Why tf are material icons so underused and font awesome so overhyped?

One word: trends.

maybe because it has more icons, they look better, the icon modifiers are great, the docs are infinitely better with very decent icon search, it has support and easy to read docs on even importing individual icons making your build size smaller?

i don't have much experience with material so maybe you can point out some advantages over font awesome

like so many features, and there's other things too... https://fontawesome.com/icons

Now after implementing it.. it's actually nice. I just don't like that there is this subscription option.

@nitwhiz yeah, I tend to dislike that...
I guess people gotta eat it too...

Checkout Iconify.
https://iconify.design/
https://github.com/iconify/iconify

It allows you to load icons from pretty much any icon library. It loads them from an API so that way it only only loads the icons the page actually uses. :)