I am not sure what country the author is in, because when I learned to write English in school (decades ago, and it was the language of instruction) very few letters required backtrack, pretty much only ‘i’ and ‘j’. I just looked at an image of the US Declaration of Independence and the same is true (the ‘t’ has a wiggle in the middle).

Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.

I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.