I'm a little reluctant to admit that I asked myself the same question... and I've written a bunch of wanky essays myself. I was pretty confused about the text,

I'm a little reluctant to admit that I asked myself the same question... and I've written a bunch of wanky essays myself. I was pretty confused about the text, so I thought, I'll reread the blurb at the top to see what the author is trying to accomplish. > We can trace a nervous path through the links and hearts that occupy our timelines. In search of answers, we’ve peeked under the covers of Material Design and examined hundreds of pattern libraries, since one of them might be secretly withholding the principles of good design within. But why are we obsessed with typographic rules? And if we were to make guidelines for setting text on the web, what form should those rules take? What's a nervous path? What timelines, specifically? And "Material Design" isn't mentioned once in the text. What is a pattern library? There are interesting points in the essay, but it makes it obvious that aside from New Web Typographers... we also need New Web Editors. By the way, the author's website causes a font change flash on every navigation; you get the feeling that the web fonts aren't being cached. From the source, it looks like there's a script at the very end of the HTML that injects another script that then changes the font. Could this be done at an earlier stage in the page load to prevent the problem? Or, why not just use ordinary @font-face URLs linking directly to the .woff files?