Mainly for performance reasons I've recently gone from using hosted/local Google Fonts to just calling the system ones (some variant of `-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Oxygen,Ubuntu,Cantarell,Open Sans,Helvetica Neue`).
At my previous job I was one of the only Linux users (using Ubuntu) and some designers were shocked how bad their designs looked on my computer due to the Ubuntu font. We removed Ubuntu from the list and just went with sans serif instead.
For brand-specific fonts though, I highly recommend cleaning the font files from any characters/features you don't need, and then just serve the (now in many cases MUCH smaller) file directly.
In this article: https://www.zachleat.com/web/web-font-data-uris/ mr. Leatherman advises against (because of the bulkiness of web fonts blocking rendering for too long) but he has not taken into account rolling your own custom mini-font with just the glyphs you need.
So I think your idle musing may indeed have merit!
Perhaps those more knowledgeable and preferably with benchmarked evidence could care to comment?
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/content/reboot/#native-fon...