Does anyone know where the use of cursive-style characters in monospace fonts originated from? (My guess would be that it came from something like Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co.)

I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code. I always thought that was an odd choice given that many folks seem to highly value legibility and immediate character recognition when they pick a monospace font.