This is really sad, and it's distasteful for them to mention Calibri in their "rationale". The change made 15 years ago wasn't a fashion churn - it was improving legibility and ergonomics by taking advantage of capabilities of new display technologies.
The switch to Calibri & friends was a real, tangible quality improvement, as those fonts were optimized for - then also new - subpixel rendering, known on Windows as ClearType. Anyone who remembers using Windows at that time, and experienced switching from CRTs to flat panel displays, can surely attest for how big jump in comfort it was to enable ClearType and ditch Arial & Courier & Times New Roman for Calibri, Consolas and Cambria.
(I've lost count of how many programs, on how many machines of various people, I've reconfigured to use Calibri and/or Consolas as default, going as far as extracting and copying over the whole font set to Windows XP machines, and by force of habit, also Windows 2000 and Win 2003 machines - which IIRC didn't have proper ClearType, but the new fonts still looked better than defaults.)
Well, I agree with you in general, but Calibri actually seems to have some / cause some trouble. I recently filed a bug against LibreOffice regarding the rendering of ligatures in documents with Calibri, where you see things like:
... and it turns out that this is due to the use of hard-coded bitmaps for ligature hinting provided for some glyphs but not others, which confuses rendering engines.
The switch to Calibri & friends was a real, tangible quality improvement, as those fonts were optimized for - then also new - subpixel rendering, known on Windows as ClearType. Anyone who remembers using Windows at that time, and experienced switching from CRTs to flat panel displays, can surely attest for how big jump in comfort it was to enable ClearType and ditch Arial & Courier & Times New Roman for Calibri, Consolas and Cambria.
(I've lost count of how many programs, on how many machines of various people, I've reconfigured to use Calibri and/or Consolas as default, going as far as extracting and copying over the whole font set to Windows XP machines, and by force of habit, also Windows 2000 and Win 2003 machines - which IIRC didn't have proper ClearType, but the new fonts still looked better than defaults.)