I came up with a proof-of-concept alternative loading strategy that didn’t block rendering, instead opting to load the assets asynchronously in exchange for a flash of fallback text (FOFT), akin to implementing font-display: swap;, I was told Customers overwhelmingly prefer to not have their pages load sans-fonts and then “pop” into place with the correct fonts… which, of course, I, every async font loading strategy, and the entire font-display/Font Loading spec disagree with.

THIS is the crux of the problem right here and something NOBODY has been able to solve yet. I'm one of the people who prefer to wait for the font to load and not have the content jump around on the page. I absolutely loathe reading a page's content when it loads only to have the FOUT change the location of words on the page. syfy.com does this and it's maddening.