That's not really accurate for Windows. There's multiple forms of DPI scaling depending on what the application understands:
There's applications that don't understand it at all, in which case the system has the application render at 96 DPI and then scales it up. However, there is a an enhanced mode that was added partway through Windows 10's life which can adjust GDI+ drawing calls to render at the correct size for the target monitor. This can help a lot with making these applications render sharply.
There's applications that understand system-wide scaling. Applications in this category are told the scaling level of the primary monitor when they start up and will continue to render with that scaling even if the system's scaling level is changed or the application is moved to a monitor with a different scaling level set. When the scaling the application started with and the scaling of the monitor don't match, the OS will perform the remainder of the scaling.
Finally, there's applications that understand per-monitor scaling. These will not be scaled in any way by the OS. They receive notifications from the system about DPI changes so they can react to both being moved to different monitors and to the user changing the scaling settings. This was enhanced a little bit into Windows 10's life with a v2 that cleans up a handful of cases that weren't properly scaling.
There's applications that don't understand it at all, in which case the system has the application render at 96 DPI and then scales it up. However, there is a an enhanced mode that was added partway through Windows 10's life which can adjust GDI+ drawing calls to render at the correct size for the target monitor. This can help a lot with making these applications render sharply.
There's applications that understand system-wide scaling. Applications in this category are told the scaling level of the primary monitor when they start up and will continue to render with that scaling even if the system's scaling level is changed or the application is moved to a monitor with a different scaling level set. When the scaling the application started with and the scaling of the monitor don't match, the OS will perform the remainder of the scaling.
Finally, there's applications that understand per-monitor scaling. These will not be scaled in any way by the OS. They receive notifications from the system about DPI changes so they can react to both being moved to different monitors and to the user changing the scaling settings. This was enhanced a little bit into Windows 10's life with a v2 that cleans up a handful of cases that weren't properly scaling.