Opentype supported ligatures in ‘96. Postscript Type 1 and even Knuth’s TeX supported ligatures to a certain extent.
It’s a pretty standard base-level feature for any sort of typesetting.
Imo this is akin to making a terminal animation by outputting blocks of ascii art. It’s not that terminals added video playback support— which would be bloat—but instead someone pushed a standard feature to a novel extent.