Most of those rules were driven by anything but practical concerns. Typography in Europe was dominated by "picket fence" black-letter scripts which emphasized t

Most of those rules were driven by anything but practical concerns. Typography in Europe was dominated by "picket fence" black-letter scripts which emphasized the vertical strokes to the near exclusion of everything else, rendering the script difficult to read even for that subset of the population which read professionally. Newspapers until very recently were horrendous evenly-spaced columns of monotonous walls of text with barely any more formatting than punctuation. Until the modern era, graphic design and to some extent design in general focused on adding more and more minute details, as if the purpose of design was to demonstrate you cared by how much time it must have have taken to produce the thing by hand. The more details, regardless of their function, the more effort it must have taken and thus the more professional it must be. If you ever have the chance to take a history of graphic design course, you'll see it's basically culture driving it with little understanding or theory. It's not really a refinement created through 3000 years of scientific inquiry and we can place our trust in the traditions of skilled artisans who built this system for us. There really isn't a system until maybe around the turn of the century. It's basically just random bullshit and we're only just starting to figure things out more formally.