For a brief moment in time, this actually made some sense. In typography, a "point" is 1/72nd of an inch. Why is unimportant (probably the smallest one could measure in 1517), but in 1984, the Apple Macintosh had a display in which a single pixel was one point. Measuring fonts in points was equivalent to measuring them in pixels. Meanwhile, the Apple Imagewriter printer produced a dot-pitch of 72 dpi, and again measuring fonts in points made sense.
Typewriters were also measuring fonts in points, but with limited choices (10pt, or 12pt).
Printer resolutions went up. Postscript, Pagemaker... Screen resolution became disconnected from traditional typography rather quickly. Within six years (about 1990 by my reckoning), one-point-per-pixel was no longer a thing anywhere meaningful (low-end Macs still did that, but it was never actually a thing on Windows, and folks doing typography seriously didn't use low-end hardware). When your printer does 600dpi, it simply doesn't matter what your screen resolution is.
And... as much as I like and appreciate @foone, points aren't an "18th Century unit of measure." They're a 16th century unit of measure, being based upon the work of Milanese typographer Francesco Torniello da Novara who defined the point as the ninth part of the height of the letters or the thickness of the principal stroke (a definition we don't actually use anymore, but he was first).
Something, something exhaustive Wikipedia article on the typographical point, French, Belgian, Fournier, Didot, something something Benjamin Franklin importing French printing presses... American standardizing print on the "pica" (12 points).
Something something Apple Retina display, Cocoa "points" automatically scaling to nearest whole number of pixels, Android density-independent pixel, Microsoft UXP... THE REAL REASON POINTS WORK STUPID ON SCREENS!