I suppose you've never dealt with encoding issues. Encoding issues are very common, funnily enough, when you're writing code meant to handle display text. Not just web pages, but even native apps that must support almost any language that isn't English. Not all work is lighthearted when it comes to fixing these mistakes, nor is the testing reliable. Accessibility is a huge deal and can bring about lawsuits. Really, it even has security implications. If one is this sloppy about fonts I doubt there's much validation going on elsewhere, yet injection attacks should be trivial to mitigate. Why overcomplicate this? No mere font in your editor is going to distinguish between the string literals for the user and the rest of the code being displayed to the programmer.
I'm not misusing these words for hyperbole. We're talking about text. Words like "literal" and "objective" belong here. At this stage of the game, few subjective decisions are left to tinker with in programming. I'm sorry if that sort of thing brings you joy. Get another hobby.
It's objectively bad to alter the visual presentation of font glyphs for non-functional purposes. If a programmer sees the same glyph with varying width, they have to wonder if it's the same underlying character. If a ligature is applied, they have to wonder if it's the same character being displayed. That's a huge waste of time for little to no benefit. We are very far away from these concerns being a thing of the past. The cognitive load must still sometimes fall back on human inspection. A cute font shouldn't prevent you from doing that, nor should anyone need to break out the hex editor to be sure. This simple knowledge cannot die off into obscurity yet.
If y'all want pretty code it must be done at the text encoding and compiler level (invent a new keyboard layout while you're at it!), not in the fonts... but that too would just repeat the sins of the past. :)
I think it became more common, especially public communication became much stronger (politics, news, corporate communications).
In human to human communication those changes don't necessarily apply. Even the politicians that are most violent with their words in speeches are often completely "normal" once the cameras are turned off.
I'm not misusing these words for hyperbole. We're talking about text. Words like "literal" and "objective" belong here. At this stage of the game, few subjective decisions are left to tinker with in programming. I'm sorry if that sort of thing brings you joy. Get another hobby.
It's objectively bad to alter the visual presentation of font glyphs for non-functional purposes. If a programmer sees the same glyph with varying width, they have to wonder if it's the same underlying character. If a ligature is applied, they have to wonder if it's the same character being displayed. That's a huge waste of time for little to no benefit. We are very far away from these concerns being a thing of the past. The cognitive load must still sometimes fall back on human inspection. A cute font shouldn't prevent you from doing that, nor should anyone need to break out the hex editor to be sure. This simple knowledge cannot die off into obscurity yet.
If y'all want pretty code it must be done at the text encoding and compiler level (invent a new keyboard layout while you're at it!), not in the fonts... but that too would just repeat the sins of the past. :)