This is what I have been doing for many years, not going crazy with the size and resolution of the monitor.
I have an R7 260x on a Core 2 Duo E6700 with a 1280x1024 17" monitor which is 1310720 pixels total. The newest thing I've played here at the moment is Crysis 2.
I have an HD 5870 on a phenom II X4 960T with a 1366x768 19" monitor which is 1049088 pixels total. The newest thing I've played here is Far Cry 3.
I have an HD6950 modified for HD6970 on a 1920x1080 22" monitor which is 2073600 pixels in total, with a Phenom II X6 1100T, I haven't played here for a long time, the last thing I played was Dragon Quest XI.
I have an RX580 on a 1920*1200 24" monitor which is 2304000 pixels total, with a Xeon E5 1620 V2.
And so on, I try to maintain a correct relationship between the GPU and the monitor.
And in short, I think that today it is the best solution, to sacrifice the size of the monitor in exchange for a less powerful GPU and less VRAM.
Years ago I had an HD7970 bought at the time of release and used it with a 17" 1280x1024 monitor, any game I played flew at that resolution with that graphics card.
I'm not going to go any further, I think most of the users of this forum will understand where I'm going.
There are users here playing on 17" or even 15" monitors, 😀