The future of web type since 2016 has been sad. I still disable web fonts due to their average lower quality compared to system fonts. Private websites tend to fare much better to big media outlets here: it's rare to find good readable fonts that don't just scream "loud type"...
Maybe even worse than that is that the font rendering I get out of newer Firefox releases (70+) or any Chromium version on linux is not on-par with system font rendering on linux.
I'm extremely picky when it comes down to font rendering. I read all day and I tweaked font rendering precisely to my desire. I can spot the difference between autohinting and native hinting on some fonts just by a cursory glance on a 200dpi display. Chrome/chromium completely ignores that and gives me a horrific view of pretty much any font. Firefox hasn't been that bad until 70+, but if you try to enable webrender it becomes just as bad as chrome.
You know what a web browser should do first and foremost _right_? Text rendering. I don't care about Web Type, Open Type or any other font feature until the font that looks perfect on my editor is rendered like shit on a browser. Browser performance is worthless if I cannot read text clearly.
People do not talk enough about fonts. I have a quite tightened build process that I can shrink my CSS/JS down to ~50KB pre-gzip, and this easily makes fonts take up the major part of the page size.
There are not enough easily accessible tooling for font optimization such as woff2, variable fonts, rendering optimizations, lazy loading, etc.
I would say people talk too much about fonts. I can block all web fonts, and that will not only save 100% of the font download size, but make most pages easier to read.
Programmers and designers discovered that fonts were a possible axis of customization, and so they jumped on the idea that it's an axis they must customize, even if it doesn't improve legibility, and significantly worsens performance.
Blink/marquee had only one of these problems, and they died out long ago.
Is it? Everyone needs to read in order to learn and communicate. Websites (especially those on mobile) are hard to read. That makes information harder to understand. Sadly even the website mentioned here displays a tiny body text... which makes it harder to read...
Just because everybody needs to read doesn't mean everybody needs custom web fonts, and just because some webpages are hard to read doesn't mean web fonts would improve them.
For most webpages I want to read these days, I hit "reader mode", which uses the same exact font for every article, and that makes it more readable.
For example, this very webpage (which is ironically about improving typography on the web) uses custom web fonts, and (as you note) this makes it less legible!
Maybe even worse than that is that the font rendering I get out of newer Firefox releases (70+) or any Chromium version on linux is not on-par with system font rendering on linux.
I'm extremely picky when it comes down to font rendering. I read all day and I tweaked font rendering precisely to my desire. I can spot the difference between autohinting and native hinting on some fonts just by a cursory glance on a 200dpi display. Chrome/chromium completely ignores that and gives me a horrific view of pretty much any font. Firefox hasn't been that bad until 70+, but if you try to enable webrender it becomes just as bad as chrome.
You know what a web browser should do first and foremost _right_? Text rendering. I don't care about Web Type, Open Type or any other font feature until the font that looks perfect on my editor is rendered like shit on a browser. Browser performance is worthless if I cannot read text clearly.