As of "lately" in the sense of "in the last 10 years", it was always great. Freetype always had great rendering, on part and often superior to both ClearType and OSX to my eyes.

I attribute the bad perceived performance of freetype to the lack of good and/or commercial fonts.

The default configuration in most distributions is decent, but with little tuning everything can be changed to your taste. I ran with grayscale AA since the beginning because I find the color fringing annoying.

I also used to like the bytecode hinter, but in the last years with my laptop having 120+ dpi, I find the freetype autohinter to be actually superior as it better preserves the letterform and provides sharper results even without subpixel AA.

The settings can also be tailored per-font, and apply system-wide, with the exception of some stupid QML and Electron apps.