I once worked at a company that put a large logo with the company name on their office building. They used the Microsoft YaHei font, and didn’t have the permission or license, so they got contacted by the Microsoft representatives. I’m not sure if they sued the company, but at the end the company I work for did pay some money to settle the case. That was about 10 years ago.
IANAL, but the discussion seems poorly framed. AIUI, font software is protected, but the glyph shapes represented therein are not. So if your company produces a software-product font, I would need your permission to legitimately use that software, but I would not need permission to write and use software that coincidentally produced exactly the same glyph shapes. TFA is not distinguishing between fonts as software and fonts as sets of glyphs of a particular design.