Is there a way to enable ligatures in Emacs other than using font-lock?

I'm asking because font-lock is slow on reasonably large buffers.

After having read it https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/os6z0d/is_there_support_for_ligatures_in_gnu_emacs/ it seems to me like Emacs is lacking built-in support for ligatures. Afaict, ligatures should be implemented in the font-rendering layer. Am I wrong?