Ligature subtables use virtual links to enforce an ordering constraint between the subtables and the coverage table. Unfortunately this has the sideeffect of prevent the subtables from being shared by another Ligature with a different coverage table since object equality compares all links real and virtual. This change makes virtual links stored separately from real links and updates the equality check to only check real links. If an object is de-duped any virtual links it has are merged into the object that replaces it.
The current CMAP4 implementation uses whatever the current codepoint ranges are and then encodes them as indivudal glyph ids or as a delta if possible. However, it's often possible to save bytes by splitting up existing ranges and encoding parts of them using deltas where the cost of splitting the range is less than encoding each glyph individual.