How many fonts do you have installed in your computer's operating system? Too many fonts can bog down the scrolling action of the font menu. Certain kinds of fonts, such as "picture fonts" (clip art images stored as glyphs) can hang up the system as it tries to render a preview.
Modern typefaces are growing so complex that I don't think there are easy ways to classify them. The general styles (serif, sans serif, script, etc) still apply, as do categories like Humanist, Grotesk, etc. But trying to classify fonts within a type family is increasingly difficult because so many modern typefaces have "super families" with dozens of styles. One super family can have upwards of 100 static font files. Each one of those OpenType files can be doing the work of more than a dozen Postscript font files for all the extended character set capabilities of OTF. Variable Fonts may have millions of possible permutations if the font file has two or more axes.
The thing that needs to happen is the engineers responsible for the inner workings of computer operating systems need to realize typefaces often have more than 4 styles. But they still have things built on categorizing fonts as Roman, Italic, Bold and Bold-Italic. I'm still putting up with OS-related glitches that mess up the availability of certain font styles in certain applications. If you have a 90 font family that cost a pretty good penny to buy you want to be able to use all those fonts, not have some of them strangely disappear or have all the bold-upright weights get turned into italic weights.
We're in the year 2023 and it's almost 2024. Parts of these operating systems are still trying to act like it's 1986 or something (and even back then there were typeface super-families, such as Neue Helvetica).
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