Getting to the bottom of line height (2019)

Having line height change from "half-leading" on the first line to "leading" seems a little bizarre to me... why mix the two systems?

It seems the last line also has "half-leading" below, and I can't see a way to compensate, so that eg aligning the bottom of two text boxes will line up the bottom baselines.

This is an interesting article, and the result seems like a reasonable compromise. One thing I don't understand: is the font-designer's chosen line-height (consider the example of Zapfino in this article) completely ignored, on the web (and in this system)? Or is it available somehow, e.g. is this what "line-height: normal" (as opposed to "line-height: 100%" or "line-height: 1.0") means? I guess not, because the MDN docs for line-height (linked from this article) says only:

> Depends on the user agent. Desktop browsers (including Firefox) use a default value of roughly 1.2, depending on the element's font-family.

Could you provide a TLDR which audience should consume the linked content?