I wouldn't call it defensive. Not overly defensive anyway. Seems like an appropriate response. The guy was needlessly pedantic. His issue wasn't that it was hard to read, just purely that he didn't personally like the font. His best argument is seriously that it's the Ikea font? Really?
I can understand it more when it's a tool or something you use frequently like the font on a phone, but it's literally a few minutes out of one movie.
Good points on both sides, but surely the correct decision by Bird would have been to delegate the font choice, to the head visual designer or some such.
Or maybe he already delegated, asked someone to make a shortlist of 5 fonts for him to choose from, and for some reason Verdana was the best on the list...
I can understand it more when it's a tool or something you use frequently like the font on a phone, but it's literally a few minutes out of one movie.