Had no idea this had a name. Very happy to find out that it does!

Cool! Thanks for crediting original thread!

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House of Leaves uses a bunch of gimmicks like this... Kind of forget if he used "rivers" specifically, but I'd be kind of surprised if he hadn't.

Let me take you back to punched card days, when people would design patterns and shapes using different characters, a single line at a time (one card, one line of 80 characters).

When the cards were just printed (to a nice, noisy, dot-matrix), you'd see the image they designed.

The copywriters in my company stare at a landing page for hours and fix little word flow details.

I remember having to explain responsive design, since words can break on screen size. The old editors who worked on magazines were kind of annoyed. But fortunately, we have better css tools like clamp, and word break to control word flow. But honestly its easier to teach the copywriter how tech works.

Rivers caused by justified text are bad for those with dyslexia and present a website accessibility issue. Good developers avoid allowing users the option.

The thing that normal people don't worry about is "readability." Bad type is harder to read, for example rivers are distracting. Turning black marks on paper into concept, metaphor, irony, narrative, setting should be as painless of a process as possible so that the most people possible have access to reading and information. Little details like letter and word spacing, font, typeface add up to something that is either easy or difficult to read.