suggestion to add a contrast stroke on bubbles and text inside bubbles to make stroke appear behind text use css property .style("paintOrder", "stroke")

that's great, thanks going to do it :) any other feedback like this is super welcome. Also regarding this visualisation (if you want :) https://sandravizz.github.io/Billion-dollar-disaster-US/ (its animated)

good work! the animation turns it into a story

thank you :) I did some changes to this one now as well, also through animation put the focus on "Tropical cyclones" basically Hurricanes as they cause in particular in the last years devastating consequences. I tried the paintOrder stroke but it always looked messy, maybe the text is too small here? Do you have a good example?