https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a
> The Unicode Standard encodes these two compatibility characters [0x0132 IJ and 0x0133 ij] to provide support for roundtrip conversion of the Dutch letter 'ij' in certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings. It is strongly preferred (and far more common) to use the two character ASCII sequence 'ij' to represent this letter instead.
You can dig in the Unicode mailing lists for discussions on this from over twenty years ago. The bottom line is that you shouldn't use 0x0132 and 0x0133 in modern text. By now this is a resolved issue.
The 'IJ' is a letter, culturally speaking, in the sense that it is capitalized as one, and that it is often rendered as a single unit (which you can see in vertical lettering, if done right), and sorted as if it was a single letter. In terms of character encoding however, it is a 'i' followed by a 'j'.
Cf.:
* https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet (first sentence!)
* https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/
See my other posts for 0x0132, which is a compatibility character for rare obsolete character encodings which did encode it on a single codepoint.