If you reduce the pixel size enough, it becomes a general purpose display technique and has no distinctive look to it. It blurs together into an average value, microscopically. A few display technologies, mostly monochromatic, actually work like this. Laser printers are an example. Generally, they are monochromatic (or quadchromatic) devices. On or off. All output is dithered. But at high resolutions like 600 dpi or more, a fine grid pattern produces a solid grey on paper.
That book (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/dt.html) is not a book on dithering; it's one of the volumes of his collected papers and only a couple of chapters (papers) towards the end are related to dithering ("Digital Halftones").