One thing that I don’t see much mentioned in the article or the comments is that for Word documents at least, Times New Roman may be a more portable default if you want the document to render identically across platforms. Not everyone has Word and Word proprietary fonts installed. Times is proprietary but available on Linux and MacOS and has a metric compatible substitute in the open source. Not sure about Calibre.

Yes, fonts can be bundled with a document but that might impose legal considerations as well as technical.

Using more "standard" fonts like Times New Roman might thus help fight against the word processing monopoly.

Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.

Using a common font like Times-compatible (metrics-wise) does help to an extent, but it can still fall off quickly with different ligatures, Unicode-combining character support etc. To be honest, I've never seen a Word document that looks exactly the same when opened on two Windows computers, even if those two computers should be roughly the same (corporate managed computers): I remember it used to be affected by print settings back in the day, but not sure what triggers it today.

Admittedly, I only use Windows computers and Word documents the last few days at work, as I've been in the Linux world for the last ~27 years otherwise.