I used to use Google fonts a fair amount, but why do I need to download a font when my browser/os already have a reasonable amount of good ones? Engineer aesthetic/logic maybe?
I had to go digging for it again and I've now bookmarked it, but this website/repo has some nice examples: https://modernfontstacks.com/
It would be a terrible day for humanity if we were all so homogeneous that one aesthetic satisfied everyone.
That's exactly why I should be the one picking my fonts, not whoever's site I'm viewing. My taste might be subjectively terrible, but no one else uses my devices, so why should someone else be sending me fonts when I just want to use whatever terrible font I like?
It's been a pretty terrible day for the Web since webfonts were born then, since every site tries to force a single font to everyone for branding reasons alone. Case in point, Atlassian's hideous new font (which I've personally blocked using uBlock Origin, lol)
I do really wish that instead of moving in that direction, that customization was the norm, with sites specifying "serif" and "sans-serif" and users were assumed to be setting those settings to what they prefer. Similar to how dark mode is now respected on at least the plurality of "important" sites.
Oddly, I did some work around this recently. I’m a terrible designer but I’m less terrible now because I did a self guided course. A 120 day course to go from a terrible designer to just a really really bad designer isn’t very marketable.
With built in fonts, if you want to support a wide range of machines, you have seven reliable fonts, one monospace and one cursive font to choose from. Georgia is a good looking serif font and I use it too much now, but the sans serif pairings aren’t great.
With CSS, you can make arial work as a heading font with a Georgia body for example, but that takes time and creates a testing burden. It only takes seconds to host a font that looks great out of the box and imposes a smaller testing burden. So for me the answer is a lack of talent that I’ve mitigated through transferring fonts on requests. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but my designs are no longer covered by a Geneva convention so that makes me feel better. :)
Some of my readers don't have Noto Sans (the best font) and Fira Code (the best font for coding) installed.