Wouldn't it be easier and give you more editing control to just put text in a <pre> element? Seems like it would be hard to algorithmically determine what will visually look good
A manual solution is possible but not very practical, as was also mentioned in the article. Especially when the web design is responsive, such manual adjustments are problematic. But HTML is (luckily) also very flexible and neither font size nor the font are guaranteed to be constant, making a manual solution break horribly in e worst case.
CSS desperately needs feature parity with something like InDesign when it comes to typesetting. Adding stuff like this is obvious, something those working with layout programs had at their disposal for a long time.
It's also nice to see some constructive issues already being raised on the project. Whether or not the current implementation is perfect, it'd be really neat to have this type of functionality implemented in a CSS spec.