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A bit off topic but is there a reason why the Cyrillic letter in the example image is slightly different than the regular “a”? Did someone redraw it from scratch and it looks kind of different or did someone actually take the “a” glyph and slightly modify it to make it Cyrillic? Because the small difference is so small that it can’t really be on purpose to make them look different, right?

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It's not required, you can re-use the exact same glyph. The letters are effectively the same (both descendants of the Greek 'alpha').

Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.

Could also be that both were traced/vectorized independently from the same source. Still, you'd think that a competent digital front creator would recognize that the glyphs should be the same and store them only once for both characters.

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