Just to document it then, the Kodi changes that are included as part of this commit are what causes the subtitle issue:
Kodi "Piers" by heitbaum · Pull Request #8936 · LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv
kodi: update to githash d212b0a (July 6 2024)
kodi: update to githash d7876de (July 9 2024)
kodi: update to githash 060417c (July 14 2024)
pcre: drop unused…
github.com
The Kodi delta being:
Comparing 21.0-Omega...060417ccfa5b21939669d404b9a223c3004ba132 · xbmc/xbmc
Kodi is an award-winning free and open source home theater/media center software and entertainment hub for digital media. With its beautiful interface and…
github.com
EDIT :: Looking at that Mesa issue, it looks like that change was only made in 25.0 which wasn't included in the nightlies at that time. I started further bisecting the issue and similarly proved it was not the font scaling. I was able to determine the front to back rendering change is the culprit. The later FBO fix-up has no impact. The default is supposed to be FBO off, so I also tried explicitly setting it to off with no effect.