I mean, I don't hate them, but when I was reading this code, I came across a section that had what I presume was "===" (three equals signs) but it was three vertical lines the length of em-dashes stacked on top of one another, and this looks like absolutely nothing I can type.

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.

> you should instantly realize what they represent

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.

With monospaced fonts, as used in programming, the ligatures take up 2 or more "spaces", but the special characters only take up one space. Thus, they are quite easily distinguished, for me.

Linters will also complain if you find rare unicode symbols in your codebase as well.

It’s an opinion. About typography. I can’t understand having an opinion that another person shouldn’t have whatever opinion about typography they want.

If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, I was simply stating my opinion on another's opinion, and I can't understand having an opinion that another person can't understand another's opinion.

Liking or disliking something harmless is a matter of taste. Treating harmless preferences as subject to outside validation isn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that everyone is allowed to enjoy or prefer what they want, as long as no one is hurt by it.

You didn’t express a disagreement with the opinion, you expressed that the opinion shouldn’t exist. That’s not the same thing.

I said that the hate is overblown and unwarranted. That's not the same as saying it shouldn't exist; rather I was hoping to hear some good counterpoints to help me understand why some people dislike them to the point of hatred.