There are no “peoples preferences” when it comes to fonts. 99% use the default settings of their browser, so any effort made to improve typesetting of a particular publication is I think more than welcome.
This! I use a custom font for my blog because there are meaningful layout and design differences between typefaces. Even "similar" faces like Arial, San Francisco or Roboto look dramatically different applied to a whole page—font metrics affect the leading (line-height), paragraph width, font size and more. If I don't know the font, those are all unknown variables, and I don't want to QA my blog on 1000 different browser/OS/device combinations.
So I use two weights (regular and bold), each weighing in at 30kb, woff2 only, preloaded in the HTML and served with long-life cache headers. I know that some users have turned off web fonts, but they've chosen that pain. For the other 99%, I just want my blog to look decent.
