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Exactly. I recently started to write some LEAN which uses a ton of Unicode characters and I still use JetBrains Mono with ligatures on. ≠ is 1 unit wide but != is 2 units wide, so it's not that confusing as one might think.

Besides, if someone insists, it's also possible to make a language-specific setting in the editor to disable ligatures in those languages :)

I once came across a true monospace ligature font. It was the absolute worst. Especially when combining letters like ff, fi, ffi...

On the other hand, this is one aspect that makes those ligatures typographically jarring to me. It replaces one compromise with another bad compromise.