There's an interesting tool I've been playing around with called BetterDisplay. With it you can enable HiDPI mode for any display, and further to dial-in almost any virtual resolution you desire.
I've been using it on a 2560x1600 display with 85% scaling. So macOS is rendering everything to 2X at 4352x2720, then downsampling to my display's resolution. It isn't retina of course, there's bit of real estate lost, but I like the tradeoff - sharper and larger text.
https://betterdisplay.pro
Free to download and try. There's a paid Pro version, but the functionality I described appears to be free.