It would appear to be that there is an environment variable that will do this, not perfectly, but certainly vastly better than previously. Sadly, the very limited documentation on it implies it is only something for development purposes, presenting a clumsy way to look at your app using different DPI settings.
The following, placed in main.cpp, worked. Yes, it could be set in the environment as well, having first tested it as a .profile entry.
qputenv("QT_FONT_DPI", QByteArray("96"));
96 DPI is just a reference value on which Qt should be doing the appropriate scaling internally. It could be almost anything and still achieve the same results. Virtual pixels are obviously used for GUI components, why not consistently for the fonts.
Though we are seeing what appears like a font substitution as well. Best guess is that Arial is being substituted for Liberation Sans, even though Liberation Sans is installed on all systems and is specifically loaded by the application. For example, the zero is much narrower on my system than on the target, as is the case of the zero in Arial as opposed to Liberation Sans.