Comment by pie_flavor

Some other fonts use character variants for this, so you can personalize your own setup. For example, with Fira Code[0], if you want to tell VS Code to not use the long = for == but still space it in a less ugly way, instead of setting ligatures to true, you set it to "'ss08'", which will then do the same thing to === and != and !==. This is also where they can hide their 'overthinking' glyphs, so the discerning user can enable them but they won't disrupt you if you just install the font normally. For example I have ss06, ss07, and cv27 enabled, for distinct escaping backslashes, =~ and !~ operators, and smooth-square [].

[0]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode