There's no irony in that: different medium.

The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].

He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.

Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.

[1] https://nos.nl/l/2594021