> why have we decided that the FOUC (“flash of unstyled content”) caused by laying out the page twice, once without and once with the fonts, is such a dire prob

> why have we decided that the FOUC (“flash of unstyled content”) caused by laying out the page twice, once without and once with the fonts, is such a dire problem that it’s worth blocking the page’s first usable render behind a ~1MB resource? Why do you think that's a majority view? Google's page speed metric which they use as a SEO signal is followed by many webdevs and it very strongly encourages displaying text with system fonts while custom fonts load, and that the top of the page is displayed quickly: "Ensure text remains visible during webfont load ... Fonts are often large files with slow load times. Some browsers hide text until the font loads, causing a flash of invisible text (FOIT)." https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/font-display https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/fon... "First Contentful Paint (FCP) is an important, user-centric metric for measuring perceived load speed because it marks the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see anything on the screen—a fast FCP helps reassure the user that something is happening." https://web.dev/articles/fcp https://web.dev/articles/fcp If you hide the page content from displaying until custom fonts load and your header image loads for example, you'll likely get a red/unacceptable score.