> Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe.

Calling replacing ">=" with a ligature for "≥" "hiding complexity" strikes me as more than a bit of a stretch. They're two different visual presentations of the same thing, neither more or less complex in-and-of-themselves.

The ligature has some external complexity, though, in that for certain things I have to remember that that's "really" 2 characters in the file, and backspacing directly in front of ≥ will net me > instead of deleting the entire thing.

So if anything, ligatures are introducing a small bit of complexity that otherwise isn't there. Any relation to Socrates' quote seems forced.