Indeed, most techniques that target the GPU have no response to stroking, they recommend generating paths beforehand so that it looks like it's stroked.

And yes, the number of triangles doesn't really make a difference in general, but in Slug's paper they say:

"At small font sizes, these triangles can become very tiny and decrease thread group occupancy on the GPU, reducing performance"

I'm not experienced enough to say how true that is/how much of a difference it makes.

> If I understand correctly the second link is basically an extension of Loop-Blinns implicit curve approach with vector textures in order to find the winding counter for each fragment in one pass.

I've read the paper, but to be honest it's a bit over my head right now, but AFAIK MPVG is an extension to this [1], which looks like it's an extension to Loop-Blinn itself, so I think you're right.

[1] "Random-Access Rendering of General Vector Graphics" http://hhoppe.com/ravg.pdf