Yeah, but you force me to stare at blank spaces while your webfont downloads [0]. I guess I should be thankful you’re not using that font for the body text, too (most sites do!).
It's the same meta-problem, though: modern webdev practices involving adding gimmicks for no good reason that introduce extra complexity and resource use, and then adding even more complexity and resource use trying to fix all the expected behavior and features of browsers that the initial gimmick broke... and doing it poorly.
I hate all these gimmicks you are talking about (slow to load fonts, unnecessary videos, fucked up scrolling, spinners everywhere, etc.).
That being said I challenge the assertion that they are used for no good reason.
- Custom fonts are used because they help shape a brand. Properly used, the choice of fonts communicates a lot (at a subconscious level) about the company or person behind it.
- Unnecessary videos unfortunately work (i.e., help grab and retain user attention). Not for me (quite the contrary!), but for the majority of people stumbling upon a company's website.
- Same for weird gimmicks involving animations and what not. I can feel them draining my battery out and it phisically hurts, but most people like them and take away the impression that "this is a modern person/company".
All in all, many website's primary goal is not to communicate factual information, but to capture user attention and/or communicate at a subconscious level, and gimmicky things work for that purpose :S
This idea that users need to see all text on your website in a particular font face (which is usually just a poorly packaged riff off of a famous font with minor changes that will largely go unnoticed by the unwashed masses) in order to market your product is absolute BS. Aside from a very few iconic font associations (e.g. IBM), there's no actual evidence that it actually works.
I fully support using a custom font for your visual assets - that's what SVG with text exported as curves/outlines was created for. But why should I use your horribly hinted, terribly rendered, absolutely illegible webfont (and have to download it to boot) just to read the copy on your website? Why should anyone?
Look at Apple. Despite what I'm sure their design team tells them, even they don't have an iconic font. They've bounced around between Helvetica, Myriad, Lucida, and a half-dozen other sans serif fonts that share certain design traits (which people do identify and associate in general), yet each time they introduce a new font they update their website to trigger your browser to download the webfont to render the page. It's a pointless exercise in the name of job security.
Companies have had websites going back 30 years. Web fonts have existed for a long time. This trend of each company having to pay tens of thousands to commission an unrecognizable, undistinguishable typeface that all text on their website must appear in is a brand new phenomenon, and there's zero proof it does anything besides (poorly) accomplish what someone thought was a good idea.
I agree; I cheated by purposefully using both meanings of "good". The reasons you mention I consider bad in ethical sense, and I believe the world would be better off if sites didn't do it.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/FAX6BDW