!= is two bloody characters not one.
And now people are doing it for 3 characters.
With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all.
See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
Unfortunately that's not true.
The problem shows itself when looking at codeblocks that developers share (in docs, blogs, videos, etc...)
Ligatures become a readability problem.