It's nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don't feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.
Not to change the subject, but your italicized "are" made me realize that Lemmy uses a different font for italic content (see the letter A). There's another message down below deleted by creator which has the same style. I know, it's a weird thing to notice, but there was a blog I saw this week mentioning that scammers are using websites with a (I think?) Cyrillic 'a' that looks just like the italic one here to fool people into thinking they're visiting a legitimate site, so that little discrepancy stood out to me today. At least now I know I'm paying attention! 😆
The closest thing I have is Ghostery, which is just an inspector. I don't use any extensions to modify the code of a page, so yeah I'm not sure either. I also use Firefox, just checked this at work and I'm seeing the same results. And the dev tools here agree with your findings -- both normal and <em> text are using the same font. The only thing I can think of is that the font itself (on my Linux computers) have a different "A" for the two styles. Ah well, not something I care enough to dig in to further, I just thought it was odd to see that discrepancy.