Recursive subdivision is not the best way to flatten quadratic Béziers to polylines. Here's a better way: https://raphlinus.github.io/graphics/curves/2019/12/23/flatten-quadbez.html … . Hopefully catnip for my followers who are really into 2D graphics and math.
DP totally makes sense if you have an expensive preprocessing step and will then play that back many times. In fact, that's how fontcrunch works. But these days I'm more interested in getting near optimal results on the fly.