I think that makes it harder to work in a language... you certainly can set up an editor autoreplacement but once a decade or so someone's going to need to hotfix something in a strange environment and trying to force things into nano using alt codes is a real pain.

That said the intentionally hard to type symbols with ascii replacements actually make me less sad than things like this syntax that requires a pipe character... I don't know if you're a polyglot (or ever typed on a keyboard in quebec) but most of these languages' symbol choices are convenient on an en-US keyboard with little consideration for international keyboard layouts and there are a lot of hard to type symbols on the spanish keyboard that are very common in programming languages.

This should be done with font ligatures, not replacing character combinations with other characters that can't be typed normally