What exactly has happened in the last couple of years? And how would installing those newer Microsoft fonts affect font rendering elsewhere than where they are

What exactly has happened in the last couple of years? And how would installing those newer Microsoft fonts affect font rendering elsewhere than where they are used (not at all by the desktop environment by default, and as to web sites, it depends on what you use)? IIRC the last big-ish change for me was around 15 years ago when some patent-encumbered patches were enabled by default by (some) Linux distributions. Which is okay for me because overall I think freetype font rendering is better than that in Windows with most fonts, the arguable exception being certain Microsoft fonts – however, freetype has the additional advantage that it rarely if ever produces pixelated ugliness with unhinted webfonts, unlike what I've seen happening with Windows.