Everyone is talking about the font size and how zooming can fix small fonts.

That's only half of the discussion. The other half is line spacing. I think that's much more important.

In his examples at the bottom, the Phoronix one really gets a big improvement by not having the lines squished together. If I open up Phoronix in my browser and add the 1.5em line-height CSS rule, the site becomes considerably more comfortable to read, without even touching the 12px font size.