With all these posts about fonts, I have to wonder, am I the weird one here for just using DejaVu Sans Mono for like past ten years and just, like, not caring that much? Does the font make that much of a difference?
And I hate ligatures as much as I hate table aliases, so Consolas suits me just fine. Although, DSM is a close second. I just wish its "<=>" were more distinguishable.
You may have overlooked it before because one of the more advertised "sequel" features is ligatures, but Cascadia is one of the fonts that uses the Mono/Code naming scheme to turn on/off ligatures. ("Cascadia Mono" doesn't include the coding ligatures that "Cascadia Code" does.)
I've been using IntelOne Mono for about 6 months now, and I like it a lot. So legible I've actually been able to drop my main editor and terminal fonts sizes down a notch or two, while remaining readable.
I do like ligatures, and I like checking out new fonts, but I'm not going to be offended if you don't. ;)
If a certain font works for you, by all means keep using it. Just like nobody should tell you what editor to use, a font is also a matter of personal preference.
That said, certain fonts have features that many find advantageous. I like that Iosevka is narrow, which means I can fit more text horizontally. Legibility and not having ambiguous symbols is also important. I also dislike ligatures, and want my font to be able to render multiple alphabets. But ultimately, I just like the way it looks. It renders nicely in all sizes and weights. All of these might be features your font choice also has, or you might not value some of these as much as me, which is perfectly fine.
It really is significantly more legible, especially in parens/braces/brackets and punctuation. Before, it was easy and common to mistype , for . or vice versa, and not notice until it failed to parse. Since, I've done that maybe twice.
Not saying there is anything wrong with it, but for me it feels like to much of a distraction.
I don't even know what font I'm currently using, though I put some thought into choosing it at the time.
Some of us just care about what our fonts look like. I'm loving the configurator with Iosevka; yes, I'll likely spend an hour tweaking a custom font, but after that I'll just be done and move on.
There's no "flex" if I never even show anyone my dev environment or talk about what font I use. I think you're experiencing selection bias in thinking that only people who flex care about their fonts. ;)
It'd be nice to have a word for something you care substantially about, but with fleeting desire and no desire to preen about.
I am on Iosevka now partly because I can pull it from AUR in my setup scripts which is something not all do.
But you claim that I am suffering from mental bias, while you know nothing about me other than a single post.
Maybe it is just that I posted something a little too close to the mark for you, and rather than reflect on why that might bother you, you externalize it.