A guy at the Portland Mini Maker Faire watched me hand-code 40 icons in Illustrator and said "you know you can just use a font file, right?" | Crafting With Code - The Design Community Hub
The font file thing works until it doesn't. Drawing each icon by hand forces you to make decisions a font generator never will, like how the curve on a wifi symbol should feel at 16px versus 200px. Fonts are great for a system, but sometimes you just need that one weird icon with a slightly thicker stroke because it sits next to a chunky button. Hand-drawing forty of them is a pain, sure, but you end up with a set that actually matches your project instead of fighting what some font maker guessed you needed. Dude was probably just trying to be helpful but missed the whole point of why you were doing it that way.