> I'm not talking about 20 year old pixel density here, but modern ultra-wide or UHD monitors
Because the monitor industry largely got to 4K and said "eh that'll do", a lot of those "ultrawide" and UHD displays with large sizes literally do have twenty year old DPI.
Increasing physical panel size (usually) used to translate to higher resolution, but at some point the majority of manufacturers stopped doing this, so you get the same 4K resolution at ever stretched physical sizes, and ever decreasing DPI.