System-ui Memes

Web designers will fight you to the death over importing a 500KB custom font file that looks exactly like Arial but costs $299 per year. Meanwhile, developers are out here begging on their knees: "Please, just use system-ui . It's free, it's fast, it loads instantly, and users already have it!" But no. Designers see font-family: system-ui; and experience genuine psychological horror. That simple CSS declaration represents everything they fear: practicality over aesthetics, performance over perfection, and the terrifying possibility that maybe, just maybe, Helvetica Neue is good enough. The best part? Users literally cannot tell the difference. But that 3-second load time from your Google Fonts import? They definitely notice that.