The idea for those ligatures was that they might interfere a lot with e.g. regular expressions. So they are only enabled on start/end of the line or when surrounded by whitespace.
The problem is, though, that you are surrounding them with something else than whitespace. Those little dots are actual characters, which are not considered space, I guess.

oh, yes, this is space:· in vim configuration set listchars=tab:│\ ,trail:•,extends:❯,precedes:❮,space:·
not sure how this should be solved then
this can be done 2 ways:
␣ • · .I’ll add those four to the exception. Can’t be solved in general case, but might be just good enough
Most helpful comment
I’ll add those four to the exception. Can’t be solved in general case, but might be just good enough