After Effects Tapered Stroke: No plugins, no expressions

This has come up repeatedly on various forums and discussions (probably because I think text layers are the answer to everything), and today I decided I was tired of explaining it in written form. I have a much longer and more indepth demo which I ve done live, and also as a tutorial for School of Motion, available here: I did a month of daily experiments using related techniques in January 2019: (Includes link to a pay