And to tell a designer to avoid 12-14px bold text of a font entirely is not an appropriate solution.
Adjusting font-size or font-weight is the only way I have found to avoid the issue. The CSS 'font-smooth' property is only supported by MacOS and has no effect on Windows. I have also tried using different font file formats (svg, ttf, woff, woff2) and adjusting the ClearType settings in Windows.
Unfortunately, I have tried using the techniques found in these references, such as the CSS 'text-rendering' property.