Web font bugs show up in the weirdest places. Unless you're constantly vigilant and manually test across all the platforms you want to support, some users will see crappy fonts. Hardly anybody goes looking for these bugs, so the bad fonts can be shipped in production for years without anybody at the company noticing. This is what has happened at Apple, Wired, and Medium.
Not that consistency is worth striving for. There's not much consistent about what you can show on both a 6" 4K OLED and a 15" 1366x768 TFT LCD. Certain fonts will look great on the former and be borderline-unreadable on the latter.
The first one is, just like it says, a bug, and apparently a bug that Apple fixed on their website. The second one is Wired using a terrible web font. Neither the possibility of having fixable bugs nor the option of choosing a terrible font strike me as particularly strong arguments against web fonts. You are already free to use system fonts at terrible sizes or contrast ratios, and many sites definitely do that.
I'm the author of that Medium article. The "second one" you referred to isn't the second bug I reported – it's just an aside on Wired's crazy headline font. They've since replaced it with a normal readable font...
I feel like we need some clarification about what "consistent" means here. If we're talking about having the typography shown to user A look exactly the same as that shown to user B, why does that matter? (And why do the major font rendering differences between Windows and macOS not matter?)
If we're talking about having the typography on user A's phone look the same as on user A's desktop, that seems a bit more reasonable, but the rest of the UI is necessarily going to be drastically different save for perhaps the color scheme.
Or is the "consistency" that matters here about making sure the website is pervasively using the same typography as the advertisements?
> If we're talking about having the typography shown to user A look exactly the same as that shown to user B, why does that matter?
Well, I suppose that's a valid question, but it's moving the goalposts. We were talking about having consistent fonts, and I'm claiming it's absolutely possible by using web fonts (after all, that's the reason web fonts exist).
Web font bugs show up in the weirdest places. Unless you're constantly vigilant and manually test across all the platforms you want to support, some users will see crappy fonts. Hardly anybody goes looking for these bugs, so the bad fonts can be shipped in production for years without anybody at the company noticing. This is what has happened at Apple, Wired, and Medium.
Not that consistency is worth striving for. There's not much consistent about what you can show on both a 6" 4K OLED and a 15" 1366x768 TFT LCD. Certain fonts will look great on the former and be borderline-unreadable on the latter.