Ligatures can be nice if you can solve the edit problem: keeping an -> as two characters even if it looks like → can help a lot. Unfortunately, editors don’t do that, so they become too annoying to use (maybe when we render code like we render latex will it be accepted).
VS code does it at least, if i'm interpreting you correctly. You can position your cursor in the middle of the ligature and change either side
It really becomes seamless, and you get used to it in a similar way to syntax highlighting or high resolution screen. Yes, I can code on 768p laptop screen with laggy input and a crappy keyboard, but it's not as nice as my usual workstation.
Now if only there are any proportional coding fonts with coding ligatures baked in :p.
Input and Go Font are the two main coding proportional fonts I know. Neither advertise ligature support. There are hacks to copy ligatures from Fira Code in to other fonts but I don't know if they would work for this purpose. https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer