At one point, SVG couldn't do that. It was a long time ago, but I recall not being able to use SVG to render sideways text because the text tag wasn't supported by browsers.

For IE, we had a PNG font that we displayed slices of, and then we migrated to rotation css as various browsers supported it. (I think IE was the last holdout, but it's been a while.)

From one implementation to another and depending on the way the SVG was encoded, text in an SVG often does not look the same for different viewers. This can seriously mess up the layout of diagrams, etc.

Plus SVG can’t properly wrap text, which matters for some use cases.

If you're rendering a PNG, you're already doing layout, so you might as well still do it but at least keep the individual glyphs as, well, glyphs (so that they scale to high DPI etc).