Unsure if this is useful to you but have you heard about GNU Unifont? It’s not as nice and comes with some asterisks but damn it’s very compact.
I first read about it via this blog post: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/04/banish-the-%ef%bf%bd-with-u...
To be fair it wouldn't really be doing its job if it didn't come with any asterisks