In a nutshell, all mobile browsers are broken.

By default, no matter the physical screen size, they use a fixed
viewport width of about 1000px, then scale down the rendered page
to make that huge viewport fit on the physical screen.
That results in poor rendering for bad websites which assume a
large fixed-size viewport (typically requiring zooming in to be able
to actually read any text), but in atrocious rendering for good
websites that make no assumption about the screen size (unreadably
small text in the top left corner, most of the screen empty).

A standard way to disable that insane behaviour and just render
normally on the actual physical screen size does not exist.
The closest thing is the CSS3 Device Adaptation Module Level 1
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-device-adapt/
but https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-deviceadaptation tells me
that basically no browser implements it, not even on mobile.

The next closest thing is the HTML meta viewport element - even though
the problem has nothing to do with HTML and is purely a CSS issue.
Standardization is not even planned for that one:
* HTML 5.2 mentions it in passing without specifying it:
https://www.w3.org/TR/html/document-metadata.html#the-meta-element
* The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group
provides very incomplete information:
https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions
* CSS3 Device Adaptation Module Level 1 already wants to deprecate it,
explaining mostly how to migrate *away* from it to some castle in
the sky that no browser implements:
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-device-adapt/#viewport-meta

While i strongly believe in sticking to well-established standards,
in the absence of standards and with atrocious behaviour being
universal, there appears to be no alternative to using whatever
works.  The meta viewport element appears to be the only way to
make real-world mobile browsers decently render any HTML page that
does not have a fixed-width layout of 1000px.  So use it, grudgingly.

Originally suggested by xcv at dr dot com.
Direction supported by espie@.

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