Disagree. Helvetica.

I don't know whether you are claiming that Helvetica is beautiful or not!

In any case I think that it is available in most browsers locally, with a fall back to sans-serif easy if not? I haven't looked lately. I value locality and speed with a font that has been picked to work nicely for the browser without trying to wrestle every pixel.

(Yes, I have been an editor, but I try to pick the readability battle first.)

I was, yes. I think it's one of the most beautiful ever. It's so readable, both in print and digitally.

https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica

It was once widely available on OS/browser, but is increasingly not. It's not on Win 11 or the latest Chrome, for example.

I glossed over your performance criteria, however; shame on me.

I self-host fonts. They’re around 45kb in total. It’s worth it.

That sounds pretty good. I'll think harder about where I should consider doing the same!

But if you are self hosting then it ain't a "Web" font IMHO, and you contain the time/latency and page-weight cost, and probably eliminate the data leakage.

It's a Google font, just without Google infrastructure. The trick is to download a subset of the font, to use preloading, and if possible early hints. Then you barely know that it's there.

Web fonts are just fonts downloaded on-demand by the browser based on css rules.

Hosting the font file(s) on your own domain doesn't suddenly make them not webfonts.