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It's not benign -- icon fonts are bad for accessibility because screen readers will read out the actual glyph unless you use pseudo-elements or extra markup. Additionally, many users on limited connections will turn off web fonts, and then your icons will break.

It's a hack that was necessary at one point, but has been largely displaced, like table layouts or image-based drop-shadows. SVG is just better nowadays[0]. You can even use the same pseudo-element tricks to insert them purely in CSS, which is yet another accessibility win.

[0]: https://css-tricks.com/icon-fonts-vs-svg/

Maybe I'm mistaken, but f I recall correctly, I think the issue with icons as font was accessibility, rather the average user with full sensory capabilities.

Similar to icon images, you'd use aria-label, aria-hidden, and title attributes.

At least in Firefox, the user can enforce their font preferences and ignore the fonts specified by the web page. Icon fonts break that.