I want to prevent LazyVim from replacing certain character combinations with these shorthand representations.
I'm still a little new to the vim/neovim ecosystem, but I've tried quite a few things and couldn't find any questions out there that mentioned what I was talking about.
This has nothing to do with Neovim or LazyVim.
It is a font feature called "ligature", which merges a common combination of characters used as an operator in programming languages to improve readability.
If you don't like them, you should disable them through the terminal settings - either by choosing a different font without ligature or disabling ligature support. How you do this depends on the terminal emulator you are using, so I cannot answer those details.