Comment by Barrin92

>If I found ligatures harder to read or edit then I wouldn't use them, but I don't, so I do

people likely prefer them for aesthetic reasons, just like they do certain color schemes, but there are objective answers in regards to legibility, and many people certainly use suboptimal setups. Lots of people code sitting hunched in front of their computer too, which is their personal preference, but also objectively bad for your neck.

Ligatures suffer from some straightforward objective issues, like being semantically wrong in certain cases. An inequality check should be a ligature, but in a literal string the character sequence is likely not intended to be subsituted. As such they create unecessary ambiguity, which is just bad.

Also they functionally don't have a reason to exist in monospaced fonts which are the norm in coding. given that The issue they're intended to address is overlapping characters.