It's an issue in China. As an anti-congestion and anti-smog measure, Beijing has rules which rotate the vehicles permitted on the roads according to the plate number (for example, on Fridays a vehicle whose number ends in 5 or 0 cannot be driven). And of course some people don't want to follow the rules, so they develop all sorts of ways to try to temporarily change their plate to one that's allowed to drive.

It's probably not a huge issue, otherwise it wouldn't have taken decades from font creation to implementation in licence plates. But if the font change is timed with other plate changes the problem is fixed extremely cheaply. I think it's totally worth it (maybe because I don't dislike the font as a licence plate font. Just don't use it for text)

I'm surprised there's so much effort to make faking plates by using black tape harder.

Let's assume somebody successfully does that. After the accident or whatever, they check the plate and it belongs to different kind of car. I would imagine there would be no more than 10 options of plates which could result in this one + black tape. And you find confirmation by checking if the car color and brand matches. It could actually be automated and should be easy even if there would be hundreds of possibilities.