Is it ok to use higher resolution than people's screens?

[LightAndDark]

E.g. if I were to make my VN 4K natively, would that be a problem for the many people using a 1080p screen? Or would it simply scale down appropriately and still look ok?

[Imperf3kt]

It'll scale appropriately, however on smaller screens (say 1280*720) you won't see fine details as they'll be crushed.
You can't really avoid the quality taking a hit whether you upscale or downscale, nd it won't be *that* noticeable unless someone is comparing the source master with the scaled version, so just go with the biggest resolution you want to support.

Be aware that larger resolution games use more memory and RAM for the exact same experience.