Yes, it's common to have this kind of acceleration in a video controller. There are VESA extensions for blitting to screen memory for example. Even something as basic as a CGA text screen—where rendering of bitmap fonts is offloaded to the video card and the CPU only needs to operate on indices into a table of predefined characters—could be considered a basic form of 2D acceleration.
The article and most discussion here however concerns rasterization, specifically path rendering, which is useful when rendering things like fonts and image formats like SVG. You use primitives such as lines and curves to form outlines of objects and then fill them. It's a problem that does not very easily translate into rendering textured triangles (which is what the GPU is best at) or copying/moving screen regions, so there's some work in doing it in a performant way still, and a lot of it typically happens on the CPU.
The article and most discussion here however concerns rasterization, specifically path rendering, which is useful when rendering things like fonts and image formats like SVG. You use primitives such as lines and curves to form outlines of objects and then fill them. It's a problem that does not very easily translate into rendering textured triangles (which is what the GPU is best at) or copying/moving screen regions, so there's some work in doing it in a performant way still, and a lot of it typically happens on the CPU.