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On iOS Safari, there’s a little “ᴀA” button left of the location bar which lets you zoom to make the text larger, reflowing the way you expect.

This makes sense to me. Pinch to zoom is a specific affordance which means “make the line segment between my fingers be this long”. It wouldn’t make sense with reflow.

Interesting.....

But if you change the font size setting on your browser you will get exactly what you want. Odd how zoom and font size are not linked the same as on desktop - at least for me on Firefox mobile.

Yes, but compare changing the size of small text on a per-site basis by changing the browser settings vs simply doing a pinch gesture...

There used to be a Firefox extension to force text reflow on any website, but recent versions with the new extension API don't allow installing it.

It's just browser developers. And I think it's largely caused by the brain worm of "you don't need that on mobile".