Maybe a silly question, but what is the issue with the ampersand?
It’s just an unnecessary, extravagant ligature of the letters "et", from 9th century Latin.
So? Most symbols are 'unnecessary'. I'm pretty sure we could get away without ^ | # @ ` { } [ and ] for example. Hell Ancient Greek didn't even have spaces.
Inconsistent and problematic encoding and decoding of & in HTML, mostly.