It's good that he threw in the towel. It takes a bit of a galaxy brain perspective to conclude that by being amateurish in his approach to font implementation with TeX/Metafont, Knuth was somehow being a more professional mathematician.
We need to accept that Knuth was an amateur type designer who was genuinely preoccupied with fonts (“I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.” — Donald Knuth https://twitter.com/TeXtip/status/1389329788628783104). He could have delegated the design of the first font for his TeX system to a professional type designer. He didn't.