"Sophisticated board designers know this inherently, so if they want a board
to have high accuracy of artwork to tooling holes, they'll have some plated
through holes with whatever minimum annular ring the PCB fabricator will
commit to."

Interesting, I've always kind of done this without knowing I was doing it.

We classify our PCB vendors based on capability, and assign vendor levels to our boards based on complexity.  Our annular ring specs don't change, but on boards that I need smaller rings, I assign a higher level vendor.  More than once, we "discovered" a mismatched vendor/board because of breakout issues.

Pete