One way to gain a different perspective could be to ask a similar question, but replace typographic adjustments with something in your domain of expertise that requires deeper experience to see the value in. Assuming programming, it might be things like linting, refactoring, testing, version controlling, etc.
Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name. Even version contolling is ubiquitous in almost any entry-level programming job, even if it wasn't before.
Most people who have made a website with CSS before would at best change the font size, the line spacing and the font face and tweak it to a point that feels easily readable and call it a day. Introducing variable widths between the characters of the font, digraphs and so on feels like more like exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.
Perhaps advanced web design/typesetting is the main application of this and it has a chance of inducing a better subconscious effect on the viewer. Sort of how magazines and books were designed back in the day I suppose.
>Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name
I'm curious but have you ever heard of anyone that works as a programmer that has not been especially keen on linting and testing (as in automated testing)?
I thought that examples of not being overly keen were quite abundant.
And it is often lamented on this site about how much work it is to get even people who have made a small to medium sized project and have the word programmer or developer in their job title to actually want to do linting and testing.
So what I'm saying is that at least for linting and testing yes, these really might seem like
>exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.
Yeah, I’ve been coding for 30 years, and to me, linting seems like alphabetizing the tools on your peg board. There are plenty of times where I want to break an expression into multiple lines—or not—in the service of readability. And there are no clear rules I could dictate to codify how I make that call.
I get that it helps people who are collaborating on large codebases. But to me, typography is orders of magnitude more important, because it’s facing the end-user.
And the answer is still no. Users / visitors don't care. We keep writing tools for ourselves and products, UIs, UXs, etc. *from the user's POV* aren't any better.
No one wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, "I want to use an application build with React, has no tech debt, and has great commit msgs...".
I'm not suggesting the tech and stack don't matter. They do. But they are a means, not the ends. The sad fact is, the ends aren't - from the users' POV - noticeably better. More bloated? More buggy? Probably.
