Yes it's highly legible at distances, but you'd never want to use it for body text. The letterforms are not well balanced -- e.g. the bowl of the 'R' is uncomfortably high, same with the top half of the 'Y'. It would be tiring to the eye to read long text in.

A lack of styling does not mean a good sense of balance.

It is ugly but highly legible. Which is just fine for the kinds of functional engraving it's meant for.

it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary.

Both of which are objectively desirable qualities of a font with massive control panels as its native habitat.

> it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary

Except for the terrible, terrible ‘0’, which looks more or less identical to the ‘O’. IIRC sometimes similar fonts had a strike-through 0 for legibility; I think the BBC Micro keyboard did, for instance.

The BBC Micro keycaps were made by Comptec (mentioned in the article) in Gorton Modified. Source: I work at signature plastics and have seen the original tooling for it.