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You are correct, and I reached out to the author about fighting their bogus claims. He wasn’t interested, but this was a while ago. Perhaps if this new parody font fights them, he’d be willing to do the same for smelvetica

IP law with fonts is kind of unintuitive. From what I’ve read, the design of a font can’t be copyrighted, but the implementation can. So you can make a font that looks identical to Helvetica and be okay, but if you copy and paste anything from the original, you’re on shaky ground. Kind of like how recipes can’t be copyrighted, but the wording and formatting of a recipe can. IANAL of course, but that’s what I’ve read in the past.

Parody doesn't apply to software. You might have noticed Monotype is always using the phrase "font software" to underline the fact that fonts are considered software, not a design, and thereby enjoy stronger protection than non-software copyrighted works.