At the end of the day the process this team followed has all the hallmarks of a great culture (-- perhaps another article?). I'm curious what kind of management by-in was required, or if this was strictly driven by engineering and design.
God -- It really shows I've been in an enterprise for far too long. :,)
I suspect it's just ultra low priority for folks making rendering engines. It doesn't make a lot of sense for web typography, and to me looks just downright daft if you're not going to pull in and accentuate the start of the first line, or if you're going to separate your paragraphs with blank lines. My personal feelings only of course, but it feels like a bastardisation between different eras of typography.
The initial-letters CSS property (maybe to be renamed?) is the future solution to this, and that should work fine with search. See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline/#initial-letter-styling
A recent example, adding drop caps (and a number of other styling changes) to unv.is:
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102329333215634483
Because I'm restyling a page, that's restricted to CSS-only methods, which for that site works marvelously. And on the principle of divorcing content and presentation, it appeals strongly.
But on Wikipedia/Mediawiki, attempting to add drop-caps + bold lede-line results in a very annoying sift of the text offset by the drop cap *merely by defining a selector for ::first-line (Firefox/OSX):
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102329661015728246
Somewhat maddenning.
