[ctidd]

On the topic of rems, when using them for layout, you'd use a body font size rather than the root element's font size to control the size of text in your page.

At that point the root font size exists only as a scaling factor, decoupled from the base font size of content within the page, but allowing the user to control that scaling factor via their browser's global default font size preference. In fact, you could think of the rem as root scaling factor unit rather than root font size unit. (The use of the font size property to set the scaling factor is a quirk of the spec.)

This solves the concern you noted on maintainability, while allowing a user to globally opt into larger or smaller text and correspondingly scaled layout across the web, arguably a win for enabling an element of accessibility by default on any website.

[codedokode]

It is not as simple as just replacing pixels with rems. Do you test your markup with different root font sizes? Do you add special rules for cases when the font size is too small or too large? Unlikely. Then you better not pretend that you support scaling the fonts using browser settings.

Also, I think that changing font size in browser settings doesn't work on most sites, so people don't use it. For example, I use normal scaling (using Ctrl + +) on this site and it works good enough, and what's most important, it works everywhere. So there is no need to support changing root font size.

[ctidd]

If you build sites that can support arbitrary viewports, extrapolating to arbitrary scaling factors on a given concrete viewport does not create an explosion of scenarios to manually test -- all you need to know is that your scaling works, and if you always build your functionality responsively, the scaling and responsive layout together just work. (I'm talking about building the whole layout with rems, not just using them for font sizes. For the latter, I'd agree with you that it's brittle and falls apart quickly.)

It's fair to point out that the browser feature is not widely used, but when it is used, it's likely by users who benefit most from the small amount of effort it takes to support it. (It's really a few lines of CSS, plus simply using rems as your websites unit whenever you'd otherwise use px. It's even easier in terms of avoiding weird 16px-based rem calculations if you make your rems 10px for a default 16px browser preference by applying a straightforward conversion on the root element.)