Debug Playfair SC (small-caps) and consider not using it

[lyzadanger]

Google Fonts provides an all-small-caps Playfair as Playfair SC, which is handy, and is set as the font-smallcaps in tailwindcss config for this site presently. It's a nice font; you can see it at play (I also use the italic of it):

It's also possible to use regular Playfair and set small-caps using CSS (font-variant-caps:all-small-caps). The effect is, however, different; it would look something like:

Playfair SC isn't all small-caps in the sense that it still has capital capitals, versus the mono-height CSS fakery. There are a few places in the site when I do truly want single-height caps, and do use CSS small-caps, e.g. contact links. I don't want variant-height capitals here:

Other drawbacks of using CSS all-small-caps are:

• I have to compensate by bumping the font size by about two "levels" in Tailwind. e.g. where font-base would suffice with Playfair SC, I have to use font-xl to make CSS small-caps approximately an equal height.
• Alignment is tough with the CSS approach because none of the rendered glyphs exceed the x-height. This makes line-height and vertical alignment obnoxious and I've hand-tuned, e.g., the position of the icons vis-a-vis the text in the above contact links.
• Obviously, one loses the finesse of the small-caps font, especially the delectable italic

But I apparently can't use Playfair SC indiscriminately either, as there is a bug in the fl ligature (see #53).

I've disabled ligatures in that instance to fix this. But then I get no ligatures!

So the questions are:

• Is the payload ding of loading Playfair SC in italic, 400- and 900-weight worth it? As I write this, I'm still leaning yes because the rest of the site is so lean, but...
• Do I need to disable ligatures on it every time I use it? Or do I just keep my eyes out like a hawk?
• Should I add a custom tailwindcss utility class for font-variant-caps:all-small-caps (that's just an ergonomic thing)?
• How much effort should I make to track down and report an issue about the SC fl ligature in the right place (is that place Google Fonts or the Playfair font's repository or...somewhere else?