The graphic designers I know all own a personal library of expensive fonts they’ve purchased over the years. Fonts being good matters a lot more than them being free
In era of reproducible science, fonts being reproducible by people matters a lot more. And free fonts can be very good as well.
The ACM revamped their article templates in 2017 and adopted open source fonts.
Really good free fonts are as rare as unicorns. One can spot good fonts by looking at the kerning, and most if not all free fonts suck at kerning, including Google Fonts.