Overriding the font-family used by the theme, purpose of the * CSS statement

[techxplorer]

I'm using this theme for one of my websites and I'd much prefer to use the system font stack.

I can see that I can override the theme defaults by having my own assets/css/scss/partials/_base.scss file.

I note that at the top of the file is this CSS statement.

* {
  font-family: inherit;
}

Can anyone tell me what the purpose of this statement is?