Comment by the_third_wave

Those who used a Commodore-64 and yearned for 80-column displays ended up using 4x7 or 4x8 fonts, in other words this font with more vertical headroom. It worked relatively well, good enough for me to use it to write many a report in a version of SpeedScript [1] I had modified to use 80 column text using just such a font plus the necessary code to actually use it. I could switch between 40- and 80-character mode using a key combination and tended to use 40-character mode while entering text, 80-character mode while formatting the document.

[1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SpeedScript