I think the hate for ligatures is overblown. You'll only encounter them in code, so you should instantly realize what they represent. I can understand _preferring_ to not have ligatures enabled, but hating them entirely seems unwarranted.
And, I think that's really my objection to coding-specific ligatures. When you're used to them, you can "instantly realize what they represent," but they're rarely as clear as simply displaying the characters that you type. Historically, ligatures come from slightly tweaking the aesthetics of letter pairs or triplets to be (subjectively) more readable, never in ways that obscure the actual characters. Coding ligatures are arguably designed to obscure the actual characters being typed. That might be relatively inoffensive, like joining the characters in "=>" to make it look like an arrow, but it's not materially helpful -- and sometimes, like the Three Mystery Lines, it's actively puzzling.
Often doesn't work in practice. I cannot instantly distinguish
• ‖ from ligated ||
• … from ligated ...
• ⁂ from ligated ***
• ⁇ from ligated ??
• → from ligated ->
• ↜ from ligated <~
• ↠ from ligated ->>
• ⇒ from ligated =>
• ⇔ from ligated <=>
• ⇜ from ligated <~~
• ∨ from ligated \/
• ∷ from ligated ::
• ≔ from ligated :=
• ≠ from ligated !=
• ≤ from ligated <=
• ≪ from ligated <<
• ⊢ from ligated |-
• ⋄ from ligated <>
• ⋘ from ligated <<<
• ◁ from ligated <|
• ⩵ from ligated ==
• × from ligated x with hex digits following
& al., but I have to examine the characters in kcharselect, a REPL or similar.
You didn’t express a disagreement with the opinion, you expressed that the opinion shouldn’t exist. That’s not the same thing.