The great advantage of MATE is that it supports older and slower hardware and works fast. The price is that it skips most computing expensive or complicated features and uses older, more simple and fast libraries (e.g. GTK).
If you want more features, you could probably try out the latest Gnome.
I use a 27 inch, 4K (3840x2160) display. At scaling factor 1 the window titles are a bit too small, at factor 2 they are bit too big. But I can live with it, enjoing the stability and speed of MATE over the years, being able to focus on my work on computer instead of trying to follow a moving target like Gnome user interface, where they seem to move and reorder settings with each release.
My current settings (hope it helps for people with typical 4K display):
xrandr --output DP-2 --mode 3840x2160 --scale 1x1
gsettings set org.mate.interface window-scaling-factor 1
gsettings set org.mate.font-rendering dpi 128
echo "For firefox open about:config, set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4"