I personally don't like any ligatures, especially when people use them in presentations to public like the article mentions. Confusion between operators is rare, but possible, for eg. when using Catalyst (https://docs.sciml.ai/Catalyst/stable/catalyst_functionality...).

> It seemed to me that the use of Greek letters and symbols is actively encouraged in the Julia documentation.

I don't remember getting that sense from the docs, but I may be wrong. The general convention is that Unicode at the level of user code is fine, and a lot of the community (including me) likes it because it makes it much closer to the actual equations and scientific notation we're working with. For libraries, it's strongly encouraged to have ASCII equivalents for any Unicode operators, keywords, etc. that you expose, and all the major libraries do this. The same is true in base Julia as well, every non-ASCII Unicode token has an ASCII equivalent too.