This seems fairly cool, and I appreciate the write up, but god I hate it so much when people write code samples that try and be fancy and use non-code-characters in their code samples. Clarity is much more important then aesthetics when it comes to code examples, if Im trying to understand something I've never seen before, having a bunch of extra non-existant symbols does not help.
Which characters, the funky '≠'? I've seen those pop up a few other times recently, which makes me wonder if there's some editor extension that just came out that maps != and !==
They're ligatures.