And somehow it's the top comment in the thread, as opposed to, say, actually discussing the font or the content of the article. Wtf.
The second blogpost actually says After 18 months of creating, refining, testing, and integrating, we flipped the switch and released Airbnb Cereal across our brand and product. 18 months?! This is HBO Silicon Valley level insanity.
Spend 18 months figuring out how to stop real issues on the marketplace like discrimination against minority guests. The only solution Airbnb has offered to quell the #AirbnbWhileBlack controversies that started in 2016 has been to force hosts and guests to click a button pledging to not discriminate. That is an actual issue. This is throwing idle bodies at a non-existent problem.
And third, If you've made the same font for Netflix, it apparently takes 3 months to make enough subtle changes to brand it "one of a kind".
In at least the cases I've seen - the reason why this happens is because design teams want to stand out and stamp their identity on the company. It is a reason to add imaginary value to internal "design studios" and promote designers to arbitrary titles.
And engineers, PMs, etc. mostly do the same. Create work, features, platforms that add no real value but simply to stamp their identity and pursue (effectively) self-promotion.
The original commenter makes a great point about saying that there are many other things to focus their energies. Okay, throwing engineers at a single problem is not a good way to do things.
But the AirBnB iOS app has been broken for ages. Various visual and functional bugs. Offline support is arguably the most important feature for an AirBnb app (if you're traveling and don't have service). But this hasn't been tackled at all.
Instead AirBnB engineers are going through all of their properties and updating their fonts, fixing issues with responsiveness/scaling, packaging on mobile platforms, etc. WHY?
This expense goes under marketing not R&D.
Specifics of your comment aside (which I may agree with), on principle it's not necessary to always discuss the "content of the article".
The post serves as a starting point. It doesn't have to confine and frame the discussion. Especially if there are other more important stuff lurking or implied behind what a post says.