I think it has to do with most devices low DPI as these latex documents historically are made for printing most of all.
I like to save these PDFs in iBooks on my mac and get back to reading them comfortably on my iPad. Works great imho.
CM was designed in the late 70s - early 80s. High resolution raster displays were an exotic item at that time. CM was meant to be used for printing documents on the printers of the era, that suffered from considerable ink bleeding.
See the pictures in [1] to see the difference between how the font looks on screen and when printed on the "right" equipment.
[1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-m...
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1. Not really in the same sense as ink bleed, in which the ink spreads from where it is applied, but more just that the pixels created by the charge were slightly larger than the specified resolution.