[dictum]

There's only so much you can get with good tiling. I used to not care about the aspect ratio debate until I started increasing font sizes in my applications. My eyesight is still good, but being able to work farther from the screen feels better, and I can keep brightness low.

I work on a 16:9 27" display where this is moot (still, I feel like I use the center 50% of the display 90% of the time) but I feel this pain in laptops.

At 16:9, for page-based content (all text editors and code tools, productivity tools, web browsers; terminals less so), you're forced to display two pages side by side. Still, they're shorter vertically than your eye can handle. Horizontally, your eye will either gravitate towards the center of the display, or have to switch between the two sides (ultimately rendering the extra area of the display temporarily useless)

At 4:3 in full screen (especially important for smaller displays) you can have a sidebar or ancillary tool occupying 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen, and the paged content occupying the rest.

I've made my peace with 16:10.