Why would someone spend years developing a front where you can't tell the difference between Il or 0O? Doesn't it hurt their ego at personal level?
Ambiguous characters may have been acceptable in typefaces designed before 1990, but they are certainly not acceptable for any more recent design, unless the typeface is designed for a very specific and limited purpose, e.g. for a single advertising poster, and they will never be used for rendering arbitrary texts.
However, I see the worst offenders on various Web pages (frequently for various URLs) where I do not control the typeface, unless I instruct the browser to ignore the style sheet of the rendered Web page and use my own fonts instead, which can be tedious or create other problems in the rendered page.
I really can't imagine this is the thinking
But yeah this whole thing seems absurd of removing the distinguishing marks on things whose only purpose is to allow us to distinguish them.
While were at it N can become \ and M as well. D can become close paren. Q can become O.
And entire font of just vertical bar, horizontal bar, open paren, close paren, forward slash, backslash and a circle. Just think of how clean it would look...