Yes it's sad how in software development, the most straightforward ways to do something (just specify cm) are usually broken. It's always exception built on exception, different per platform, different per browser.
I guess to do it correctly you'd have to write javascript to reliably detect the DPI on all platforms/browsers (as far as possible, if not make some educated guess) then adapt your text sizes to that :(
So I can certainly understand 'just choose 16px and be done with it'.
Crazy-speak IMO, and I suspect I'm not the only one... perhaps someone in the standards community could explain the rationale.