To me the only downside of IEEE 754 is that most languages including C and C++ do not provide a sensible canonical comparison methods. This leads to surprised beginners and then a ton of home made solutions which are often not appropriate.
I think it depends, in languages which have implicit type coercion I think that would hurt. In languages like swift, where you need to explicitly cast even an Int to Double it would be less of a footgun. I'd rather floats have some overloaded operator maybe ~=, for approximate comparison.
