This is not an accurate take. Especially the SSR one. Pretext doesn't liberate text layout from the browser entirely (at least not yet). It still uses canvas.measureText that does critical heavy lifting like font fallbacks, default styles, etc.

Once you take pretext out of browser environment, you'll have to worry about lot more things around fonts.

OP here, you're right. I discuss that as a next step at the end. The process to get to this point is the insight to how to accomplish this cross platforms.