I’d like to say more than “me too,” but you’ve nailed why I love ligature fonts so much.
It’s strange to me how the OP is so laser focused on ligatures being “bad” because they violate Unicode. Coding up novel solutions is a stalwart of what it means to be a capital ‘H’ Hacker! I’m almost offended on a cultural level that they couldn’t at the very least appreciate the spirit of ligatures in programmer fonts.
Personally, I’ve never experienced a situation where Fira Code was the cause of of an ambiguous syntax or Unicode issues. But if they have, why not come up with a solution instead of being a hater?