As someone who's largely stuck with middle of the road hardware for financial reasons, i find that 1080p monitors are the sweet spot between having the screen estate for my programs and plenty of text on the screen, but also graphics performance if i ever want to do something else - from watching movies, doing 3D modelling or 3D printing, to gaming without resolution scaling.
Of course, i splurged a little bit on an RX 570, so currently i have multiple monitors connected to my PC, two stacked vertically, one on my PC case to the side, and another turned in portrait orientation to the other side. Personally, that setup works for me, since the way OSes do window snapping and tiling is inconsistent, so it's easy to work in both Windows and Linux with multiple monitors, without trying to split everything up into smaller zones or trying to use a tiling window manager.
However, if you want to customize things further (e.g. Windows doesn't really do vertically stacked snapping zones), the PowerToys FancyZones is suitable for this, whereas at least some Linux desktops can probably be customized to do this too (without spending too much time, i think LXDE didn't let you alter it that much, or another DE/WM, though my memory might fail me here).
There's something immensely useful about having one monitor for previewing the webpage or software that i'm working on, one for writing the code or using my Git client of choice, and another for anything from documentation, chat apps in the background or even just watching a video.
I'd say that the biggest problem with this setup is that i needed to make my own VESA mounts and a stand out of some PVC tubing and PLA plastic (3D printed and screwed on with bolts), since the options for any sort of custom monitor configuration out there are limited, if you don't want to spend a lot of money on it.
I used 1080p for 5 years with a 33 inch screen, it was very good.
For 4 years I have used a 27-29 inch screen at 2k, that's incredible. I now use a 34" wide angle screen at 2k, which I find even better, since I have a bit more width without much (or any?) extra height.
At this exact moment I am on a 34" ultrawide and it's too wide for me I have to turn my head too much.
Bottom line, you can get 27" 2k screens for very cheap now and it's a step up from the 1080p, but yeah, the 1920x1080 is fine.
Head turning is actually why I have a vertical monitor. With a 1440p next to a 1080, I'd have to turn my head a ton to see it all. Now with my 1080p vertical less movement. It also nice that webpages like being above 1000 pixels wide, so splitting two web pages on the vertical keeps them in their desktop version.
Apart from the reasons in the post above, there's also the fact that i wouldn't have enough space on my desk for multiple monitors at a much higher resolution, unless i were to use fewer of them - few large monitors at high resolutions (or just one) also work for some folks, of course.
The aforementioned window snapping issue would also take work with my current workflow.
And in regards to games and multitasking while playing them, having some titles take up the whole screen and not let me watch a video in the background would be annoying, too, unless i were to always play them in windowed mode.
Oh, and don't get me started on software, especially the kind that doesn't utilize native UI frameworks, not respecting high DPI configurations and everything therefore being unreadably small. On the other hand, resolution scaling in Windows sucks in certain software, e.g. i have a 27" monitor at work and scaling with a factor of 125% makes things blurry, which is really annoying.
So it's also a certain bit of modern OSes largely being defective and insufficient when dealing with certain configurations.
Would having a better GPU be nice? Sure. In this economy? Probably not. I also throttle my RX 570 to a 50% power limit, otherwise it tends to get loud sometimes.
Of course, i splurged a little bit on an RX 570, so currently i have multiple monitors connected to my PC, two stacked vertically, one on my PC case to the side, and another turned in portrait orientation to the other side. Personally, that setup works for me, since the way OSes do window snapping and tiling is inconsistent, so it's easy to work in both Windows and Linux with multiple monitors, without trying to split everything up into smaller zones or trying to use a tiling window manager.
However, if you want to customize things further (e.g. Windows doesn't really do vertically stacked snapping zones), the PowerToys FancyZones is suitable for this, whereas at least some Linux desktops can probably be customized to do this too (without spending too much time, i think LXDE didn't let you alter it that much, or another DE/WM, though my memory might fail me here).
There's something immensely useful about having one monitor for previewing the webpage or software that i'm working on, one for writing the code or using my Git client of choice, and another for anything from documentation, chat apps in the background or even just watching a video.
I'd say that the biggest problem with this setup is that i needed to make my own VESA mounts and a stand out of some PVC tubing and PLA plastic (3D printed and screwed on with bolts), since the options for any sort of custom monitor configuration out there are limited, if you don't want to spend a lot of money on it.