Upscaling Pixel Art to Allow Flexible Rotation/Zooming Without Blurring?

When making a pixel art game, a sacred rule is to avoid scenarios where the pixel art is rotated or stretched in such a way that you get blurry partially transparent pixels from the engine trying to smooth the motion/scaling. To avoid this, you typically need to rotate in 90 degree increments and scale with integer factors.

It occured to me that one way to mitigate the issue would be to upscale the art, for example 5x or 10x the drawn size (i.e., one pixel becomes 25 pixels or 100 pixels) and then adjust the zoom in-game to have it still appear as pixel art. While the issues may still exist, at that scale they'd be much more subtle and IMO forgiveable.

Has anyone does this in one of their games, or can recommend a good video/article discussing it? Are there recommended minimum scaling factors to do for best results (like above I floated 5x/10x, but I don't know if that's excessive)?

Thank you!