But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?
Fun fact: The German "eszsett" (ß; U+00DF) is a ligature for "ss" (specifically the "long s"[0] and a normal "s") that evolved over time to be one "letter".[1]
Exactly.
(skipping some minor details)
When we started printing instead of writing, we dumbed the letterset down into fewer mechanical pieces. Thus earlier printers in English had to use the letter 'f' for the discarded "long 's'" letter, back when the long 's' was still expected by readers.
And that dumbed-down letterset was the one that then made it to typewriters and then our keyboard today.
Do we really need to continue this stuff on computer screens.
The stroke just doesn't go in the right direction for those ligatures. My guess is that this font is based on a French (or maybe other latin) script.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ligature_typograph...
But also French typographical ligatures (well beyond the syntactic ones that are mandatory) aren't really related to cursives, they are a typographical convention. like the cursive s doesn't look like s and wouldn't have a ligature with t from the top of the t in cursive. (However, at least for French cursives it's common to do a single cross for double tt which I guess is a ligature?)
I also only learned cursives in school. In fact writing in script was forbidden and not taught at all.