Google Fonts is no longer best practice due to worse performance and privacy (and the questionable ethics of giving stuff to Google for free) compared to self-hosted fonts. So, OP should take this suggestion with a grain of salt.
It is a great place to find fonts. I download them and serve them from our own platform, to avoid precisely the privacy issues.
You don’t need to use google fonts as a CDN, but I think a lot of people use google fonts to look for fonts they then download and self-host.
Being in the Google Fonts catalog doesn't mean you have to load it from their CDN. Plenty of people find a font there, download the files and self-host them, and fontsource packages the whole catalog for npm.