If you look closely, Kana appears a little thicker than Kanji and Latin characters. Hangeul also appears thicker just like the Kana.
It seems to affect Dolphin and Strawberry. But I noticed that the Firefox file picker is fine:
Actually, Firefox itself is completely fine and I'm pretty sure it just uses Noto fonts as well. Fonts on Discord are also okay.
One thing I did notice is that "Noto Sans CJK" (JP/KR/SC/TC/etc) DOES appear thicker in the Font System Settings of KDE. This is what "Noto Sans Regular" looks like:
And this is what "Noto Sans CJK" looks like:
Notice that both "Regular" text do not appear to be the same. The CJK one is thicker.
Right now, a work-around is to set my main font as "Noto Sans CJK" but set it to "Light" instead of "Regular" and it looks pretty good:
But the Monospace Noto Sans CJK is thick as well with no option to make it lighter. Not as much of an issue as the graphical apps though:
This is a fresh install of Fedora 43 KDE btw. Hope someone can help me out here before I nuke this install for Bazzite, CachyOS, or something else lol
I recall very long time ago, I used to have improperly rendered CJK because of language setting.
Apparently, some character can be renderer differently in Kanji and Chinese, which causes size/type face inconsistency. Can you add Japanese as the secondary (or primary) language in your machine, restart and see if it fixes anything?
I put it up like this (including just keeping 日本語) and the fonts are still thick :(