Publisher v. 2.0 on a MacBook Pro (M1 2020) with macOS 11.7 (20G817)
Hardware acceleration is on and has no effect.
In fonts which have a 'GPOS type 8 chaining contextual lookup' within the kern feature, as is required for kerning tripplets such as <f, T>, no kerning data provided by the font is displayed by the app. If required, I can provide examples directly via email. Also for fonts which have only an old-style kern table no kerning is read from the font. As an example you can use the version of Optima that is included in MacOS.
Whereas the old-style kern table is a legacy format, support of system fonts should be provided.
The use of 'GPOS type 8 chaining contextual lookups' within the kern feature is in line with the OpenType specification and should be catered for by a professional layout app.
For reference see also: