A few people thought this, there's a GitHub ticket for it which they closed after they added a variant in v1.2 for a standard i and a loopy l that you can opt in to use.

Can't quickly find a screenshot though you can use web dev tools to add

   font-feature-settings: "cv10" 1;

To the interactive demo on https://monaspace.githubnext.com

Yeah, I think the italics compounds the problem in their comment example: // Notify aZZ Zisteners

I feel like that font is a real bad apple. The other ones are decent and I like the "texture healing" (but not its name)