Yes; the quality of such upscaling is noticeably worse than just doing proper upscaling, especially when it comes to text rendering. IIRC macOS does it this way because it historically only had integer upscaling, and when apps depend on that, changing it can be a major break.
I can certainly select fractional settings in the display settings right now (default is 2x). But as mentioned before, the fractional scaling factors are not exposed to any software.