Comment by exDM69

You need to remember that when TrueType fonts were introduced, a typical display resolution was 640x480 to 800x600 on a 13-15" display.

If you rasterize the Bezier curve outline of a ttf font at that resolution, you will have very crooked characters without anti aliasing and very blurry with AA.

At the same time the same font files needed to look good on print paper with a very different DPI setting.

It's a compromise between bitmap and outline fonts. Not ideal but it delivered good results on display and on paper at the time.

The hinting engine is not (?) used that much any more with large resolutions where we can comfortably just rasterize the outline with some AA and have good results.