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I've seen that too on other sites, and I think it's a font rendering bug with hinting or subpixel smoothing not properly adjusting the bounding box that needs to be repainted.

I see that too in Firefox on macOS, even with all blocking turned off.

You can fix it with Vim’s ^L command (control-L: refresh display). I’ve had to do that in the MacVim GUI occasionally too, especially when displaying symbols such as “→” that are wider than a normal character.

why do you block webfonts?

Same reason people block Google Analytics or Facebook Like buttons. Many fonts are hosted by fonts.google.com

Personally because I prefer the fonts that I have chosen.

Font parsers are generally poorly written so avoiding untrusted fonts is more secure. Web fonts also slow down the web and are a privacy issue. All that for no gain because they are completely useless. I already have fonts on my computer and they are fine. That’s why I block web fonts.