The contents of the book are wonderful, but I can't stop admiring the TeX typesetting itself. It's startling how effortless it is to read this document compared to 99% of Web-based reading I do every day. The things that stand out to me most are the lack of vertical whitespace "rivers" due to the smart kerning & tracking, the small-caps for technical initialisms like 'HTML', and the beautiful beautiful Garamond of the body text. I should use LaTeX more :)
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I agree with the spirit of this comment: good typesetting is a delight, and TeX is the best tool I've seen for achieving it. We are lucky that its author made the result of his researches freely available, and that a community has kept it alive. I'll just point out that simply using LaTeX does not automatically guarantee great typesetting (you have to know what you want) though it does provide a baseline of decent paragraphs at least. Nit: TeX/LaTeX do not inherently avoid rivers (though see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/29049/48 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/4507/48), and the body font in this PDF is not Garamond but Linux Libertine.
The typesetting of this book seems due to Andres Raba (sarabander on GitHub), and the LaTeX is generated by a script from texinfo format: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf/tree/5b3a5b2/src
TeX isn't so bad when you use a typeface other than the eyeball-scarring, madness-inducing Computer Modern.
Computer Modern looks decent in print, which it was designed for (pick up any book by Knuth, not a modern book typeset with LaTeX). It looks less good on screen, partly because on-screen output barely existed at the time it was designed, and partly because what you've seen is probably not really Computer Modern: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722/48
A similar story happened to Courier, which, afaik, was digitized from the designs meant for printing and thus accounting for print ink gain. On its own the the font's forms look too thin too.
To each their own of course but I rather love that typeface
What’s wrong with computer modern?
It looks so much better than my Google books edition on Android (Moto g6).