There’s an obvious reason to want <script defer>… you want to give the browser the hint to nonblockingly download/parse the script(s, in order,) in the background from the document <head> but defer until the document is actually ready (thus avoiding an eager download/parse just to set up a "DOMContentLoaded" event handler) or not getting any control on how/when the script will be executed like <script async>. If avoiding build tool complexity, it’s perfectly reasonable to build a few individual scripts & place them in the <head> with <script defer>.

But I agree that justified text + hyphenation is generally pretty awful on the web. The text layout engine is good enough & you don’t have enough reasonable control since screen sizes vary, unlike print. This always looks horrible on my phone in portrait—not to mention behaves worse since it costs quite a lot to calculate on the fly.

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