I can only speak for me as someone who really loves the aesthetics of code, but there's something super enjoyable about things like arrow functions rendering as actual arrows in Java / JavaScript. It's so clean!
I agree, for this reason I don't think it is right to do on a font level.
I prefer to use my editor's (emacs) capability to do visual substitutions depending on language that I am using.
Ligature mishaps are doubleplus-unclean.