> Not using fonts is not always an option

The silliness of this is that someone is going through the effort to set up hosting for a website but hosting the fonts is just too difficult and has to be delegated to a third party. The laziness of webdevs never fails to astound.

I don't think it's laziness. My conscious brain knows that it's anachronistic, but I still have the instinct to use a CDN for the shared caching between sites. Obviously, browser privacy changes mean that isn't a valid reason any more, but for me the instinct is still there.

Sites will setup a CDN to serve their own custom assets, but fonts? nope not doable. It's 100% laziness.

I'm not talking about setting up a CDN for custom assets, I'm talking about using something like jsdelivr or Google Fonts. Back in the day using those was a "best practice" because most people would (in theory) already have whatever font/library you're using cached. A lot of people, myself included, still have that as a habit that takes conscious effort to avoid falling into.

> Not using fonts is not always an option

Do you have an example where doing something in an external font is not possible in one that's built into the browser?

Sure, not all sites need them custom fonts; I hate when I’m reading a page and it reflows because the font changed, but there’s legitimate uses for fonts. Case in point: icon fonts that work using the “private use area” in Unicode.