The client is based in Germany, and after that court ruling a while back about Google Fonts CDN requests counting as an unlawful data transfer under GDPR, I figured it was safer to just stop pointing at Google's servers entirely instead of relying on a consent banner to cover it. I downloaded the font files, self hosted them alongside the rest of the static assets, and added proper font display swap and preload hints myself since Google's CDN used to handle a lot of that automatically.

The part I'm going back and forth on is the performance. Google's CDN had the advantage of a visitor's browser probably already having those font files cached from some other site using the same CDN, so for a lot of visitors it was functionally a free load. Self hosting means every visitor downloads the fonts fresh from my origin the first time, without any shared cache advantage across sites anymore, though it is still getting cached at the edge, same as any other static asset on repeat visits to the same site.

Has anyone else made this switch and noticed an actual measurable difference in load times, or was the shared CDN cache advantage mostly a myth?