Before valiantly jumping to help the poor defenceless people who rejoice at the Ubuntu fonts abundance, let’s define the issue, shall we?
Those poor babylonians in need of cuneiforms will get them at install time. Then, either they know about fonts and install them egyptian hieroglyphs when needed, either they don’t care. To be clear, I’m not kidding about cuneiforms and hieroglyphs, they are included by default.
As I see it, the issue is too many irrelevant choices in the font selection - for anyone.
One of rituals I do on every clean Kubuntu (my OS of choice) install is
sudo apt purge fonts-{noto-unhinted,noto-cjk,beng*,deva*,gargi,gujr*,guru*,indic,kacst*,kalapi,khmeros-core,knda,gubbi,lklug-sinhala,mlym,orya*,navilu,nakula,pagul,sahadeva,sarai,sil-*,smc*,taml,telu*,thai-tlwg,tlwg-*,yrsa-rasa,lohit*,samyak*}
Lots of fun, I even uninstalled Kubuntu at one time because I was too nervous to read the depedencies list 
. Then I’m going into System Settings and disable or delete the Noto variants I don’t need. Because Noto variants cannot be uninstalled, just deleted. It’s good that every alphabet has several variants, but who can say the differences among them, let alone needing all of them. So, yeah, I’m willing to jump through those hoops to protect my sanity from the excessive scrolling.
Aside from blaming the apps for not being able to scroll through more than a hundred fonts while displaying them (I’m being sarcastic here), there is the cognitive load. The last thing I need when I feverishly scramble to put my last idea into design is to scroll through one hundred Noto fonts. Even someone using Bengali language on their system would appreciate not having to scroll so much when they need the Yrsa font.
What can be done to decrease the font selection choice burden? Obviously, there need to be fewer choices.
I expect most of the solutions coming from the GUI designers. I.e. many of the choices are only variants of Noto - collapsing them into a flyout menu would be a serious help.
Another option would be to have the fonts installed, but disabled. Then, during the system install, the user would be presented with a fonts list, just like the app list, and would be asked to choose what to enable (although enabling fonts is a KDE thing, I’m not sure how well it translates to other desktop environments)
Having a font install dialog structured by alphabets the same way countries are structured by continents would also help. Or having the font selection structured the same way.
On the one hand, the current situation affects people needing more than the system installation fonts or people working with fonts, usually in the design business. I’m not sure how many are they. Considering how common working with Word/Writer documents is, their numbers could be significant.
On the other hand, who would be affected by not having all the fonts pushed through the installation by default? The most important fonts are the ones used for the installation of the system and those are the ones most people care about. Whoever wants more fonts knows to cherry pick from list.
So, who needs hieroglyphs next to their cuneiforms and cannot install them? I cannot think of anyone.
