For the uninformed, here’s the other side of the argument:

The Scourge of Arial

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use
a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to
anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has
spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and
illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the
world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather
homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a
typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as
important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much
character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

[...]

I can almost hear young designers now
saying, “Helvetica? That’s that font that looks kinda like
Arial, right?”

From Mark Simpson Studio

And now, don’t ever ask about how Arial became infamous. Being used as a font that used as a substitute because Microsoft was being cheap doesn’t make the font any better, does it?

Not that Arial cannot be used in a nice way; there have been some websites that looked good with Arial—maybe because there isn’t another web-safe font out there that is half-decent—even Arial barely qualifies. I don’t have anything against Arial—but what I have a problem with is the fact that Arial didn’t rise into fame through it’s sheer beauty but through Microsoft being a cheapskate and mass distribution.