Poor on-screen font antialiasing/smoothing in mplcairo

I'm trying to switch to using the mplcairo backend because it does certain things better than the MacOSX backend, especially when colormaps have transparency. However, I've noticed that the font smoothing, at least for plots displayed on the screen, is noticeably poorer. The code below offers a MWE:

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot(np.linspace(0,1,10), np.linspace(0,1,10), '-o')
plt.setp(plt.gca().get_xticklabels(), size=14)
plt.setp(plt.gca().get_yticklabels(), size=14)

With the mplcairo backend, the tick labels look jagged and not smooth, as below.

Whereas with the MacOSX backend gives me noticeably smoother fonts.

Everything is identical for the production of the two figures except the backend, which I switch in .matplotlibrc. Am I missing something? Is there a way to get mplcairo to render fonts with proper smoothing?

import mplcairo
mplcairo.get_versions()
{'python': '3.11.6 (main, Oct 12 2023, 21:46:57) [Clang 15.0.0 (clang-1500.0.40.1)]',
 'mplcairo': '0.5.post32+ge771c74',
 'matplotlib': '3.8.0',
 'cairo': '1.17.6 @ /Users/sbasu1/packages/macports/lib/libcairo.2.dylib',
 'freetype': '2.13.2 @ /Users/sbasu1/packages/macports/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib',
 'pybind11': '2.11.1',
 'raqm': None,
 'harfbuzz': None}

Comienza ejecutando el MWE de Python proporcionado con los backends mplcairo y MacOSX, usando como referencia las versiones indicadas de mplcairo, Matplotlib, Cairo y FreeType. Compara la representación del texto en pantalla e investiga la ruta de renderizado de fuentes del backend. Se considera terminado cuando se haya establecido si se admite un suavizado equivalente y se haya mejorado o documentado claramente la limitación y la configuración disponible.