The decision then is between building "an automated Inkscape pipeline to turn text into plain paths" and creating a PNG.
It's been a big success. The resulting SVGs are significantly smaller in filesize than PNG, and are crisp and readable no matter how the user zooms in.
The path conversion is a single inkscape command line invocation. It's worth doing.
If it comes out of a vector application, you likely don't want to rasterize it for distribution.