My hot take is that browsers should never have enabled you to specify an exact font. The web would be much better off if it was accepted that the server could only suggest how the content is displayed, not control it.
Your hot take reduces to that the web should never have become a product, which is equally defensible and in my view the formulation more likely productive of interestingly nuanced discussion. For example, we could critique the Gopher and Gemini crowds' sort of conceptually Sapir-Whorf-esque approach to at least notional redress, or ask what effect clientside inference might come to have.