I've been feeling a bit weird using icon fonts lately, especially because of the accessibility concerns—and especially with the trend of using italic text to put in an icon!
Fortunately, this blog post linked to by the ForkAwesome repo (it's a now-defunct fork of FontAwesome) has some suggestions for alternatives. TL;DR: use SVGs directly 
https://www.irigoyen.dev/blog/2021/02/17/stop-using-icon-fonts/