Comment by netsharc

I'm guessing it's because those were the shapes that were delivered for the Latin characters in one of the earliest CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, the MingLiU: https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html

I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer).

It was even there on Windows 3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts