[cseelus]

Why do folks that don‘t want to use them even care?

It’s not that when they are used, different code is produced. As with the editors color scheme, it’s just a personal choice everyone can live out within the privacy of his or her editor.

Personally I find it nice to represent single logical tokens like => or === with just a single character.

[ilikehurdles]

I’m on your side with ligatures. Pry them from my cold dead hands. But given that the author is a font designer he probably has had many heated discussions on the matter and that’s probably why he cares so much.