All you need is 5 fonts

I'd be curious to have somebody elaborate on his list:

A geometric sans serif

A high quality serif for long text

A workhorse font

A web safe font

A variable font

Under what circumstances do you go for your "variable font"? What's the difference between the "workhorse" and the first two items? (His "workhorse" is a family containing both a serif and a sans serif. Though I have a hard time seeing Roboto Slab as a body font.)

The article is about design for web. Shouldn't they all be web safe fonts?

I always just done:

    font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica;

Well at least for CSS on the web. When designing posters I usually visit dafont.com to find something suitable. Remote webfonts don't even load for me since I turned them off in uBlock Origin. The web looks less stylized and fancy (just the way I like it).

Relevant: https://fontsinuse.com/uses/28760/neon-genesis-evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion made heavy (and iconic) use of Helvetica and Century in the English episode title cards.

Right now I have two. One that has letterforms I like in the roman alphabet, and one that has Japanese and Chinese letterforms.

(Unlike a web browser, I'm using a text rendering engine that doesn't merge fonts together behind my back, so I pick letters that I like in the languages that I need.)