Various questions about cloth

I’ve noticed that cloth behaves very differently in movement and performance between high poly (40,000) and low poly (1,000) meshes. What is the ideal range/sweet spot?

Basically, all the cloth settings produce different effects depending on the poly count, but I have no idea which is more “accurate”. For example, low poly cloth is effected by the density setting far more than high poly is, is this intentional behaviour or is the difference supposed to be subtle? Almost every setting is like this.