Text is the sine qua non of GUIs. Text is also the bane of renderers--there is a reason why we have exactly 3 text shaping engines--Windows, Apple, Harfbuzz.

Text is the sine qua non of GUIs. Text is also the bane of renderers--there is a reason why we have exactly 3 text shaping engines--Windows, Apple, Harfbuzz. Text is a beast to deal with and is often ill-specified. Text is also the bane of GPUs--we don't have good GPU-only algorithms for taking a string of text, handing that to the GPU, and having the GPU render that directly to a buffer. Text is also something that games suck at rendering. SDF (signed distance fields) are considered a good rendering of text in the 3D world and they are blurry as hell. I do think that the modern GUI world is going in a lot of wrong directions, but you must deal with text accurately to call yourself a real GUI.