Go Enjoy Some Manga in Print
A random jaunt to derelict early-mid-2010s blogospheres landed me on a discourse about shoujo manga's cluttered appearance, where the blogger hurled profanities at the works he claimed to hate before confessing that he did like some shoujo manga because these didn't look like other shoujo manga. A couple paragraphs of self-hatred because he just couldn't stop reading a title he said was trash in all aspects. Below it, his readers piled onto the bashings and accused him of treachery when he professed his begrudged approval of some titles, that he just couldn't drop reading. Some other people called him a misogynist while he tried his best to claim he was only a purveyor of quality, and look he did say some titles were good (when they didn't try to look like other shoujo manga!). It was equal part hilarious and sad, too childish to take offense of.
I sincerely wish the blogger the best. Perhaps now he could enjoy all manners of styles without attributing them to a false sense of taste, or at least recognize that what doesn't suit one is not necessarily objectively bad. Perhaps he had stopped feeling the self-hatred and could simply enjoy what he found enjoyable.
But it did get me to think that for many people, their encounter with manga pages are, and perhaps have always been, online. On their screens. While these days many manga titles are made for direct-to-digital consumption, a sizable number of the media were, and still are, made for print. It may not sound like a problem unless you're familiar with the world of scanlation, or have experience scanning physical artworks for digital reproduction. But take any print manga's online page and see if you can find one in print. The difference can be light and day.
See, the techniques used in print manga tend to be optimized for copier machines. Physical screentones are halftones used to emulate grayscale, as the copier machines can only see black and white. It's essentially a collection of dots spaced apart to produce an optical illusion of color. Manual shading can look uneven when copied, while manually drawing the dots take so much time. When these images are scanned, they tend to look ugly and artifacted (especially if you compare it to digital screentones in today's works, which survive scaling and compression slightly better). Not to mention the paper manga is printed on is usually easily smudged.
Keep in mind that the blog was written in early-mid-2010s, when legal ways to read manga online was not as widespread. Many people's digital manga diet was presumably fan scanlators' attempts, which ranged from a person in his bedroom focusing on just getting the words out to an international team comprised of the most eager volunteer cleaners and redrawers. The scanner might be a phone camera. A ten-year old beast passed down in the family, the plate scratched and sullied but still chugging along. Or a purposefully bought high-end machine, if someone was so inclined. It was even worse for people accessing aggregator sites which took images from the original scanlator sites (which might not even be HQ to begin with) and compressed them further. Even the cleanest, crispest lines would lose all clarity at this point.
Shoujo manga tends to employ more delicate lines and screentones in its iconography, so it's easy to understand why they could appear more cluttered in scans than, say, shounen (esp. the perennial genre of battle fantasy, which could even look good/intentional with the rougher/dirtier appearance).
If you have never enjoyed manga in print, I wish you would have the chance to one day.