I use icomoon and it is definitely helpful but I must say the UX for creating icon sets is quite scary to use. Clicking on an icon by default removes or adds it to the icon set, so its incredibly easy to exclude an icon you are using already (meaning next time you publish your font, that icon will no longer render on your page)

Yeah, I've done this countless times, only realising once I have packaged it into my project. I ended up creating a Webpack loader which takes a small JSON file and creates an icon set for my project. I could consider releasing it on Github if there is interest in something like this?

That would be awesome, I'd definitely be interested in having a look.

Absolutely!

I use Icomoon extensively, it works great.

I usually use icomoon as well. Are there any benefits to font awesome over icomoon?

One is that there is a much better chance that your user is going to have the font pack already cached.

Do people actually include the entire font? I usually just grab the few svg icons I need and include those.

For FA? I would expect so. It' much easier to just link to the whole package for most people.