Hi,
Well, one less file means a bit more speed. But the difference should be negligible.
However, if you do that it also means that all the icons of HikaShop on the frontend won't display.
This option should only be changed if your template already loads itself font-awesome.
The goal here is not to make HikaShop lighter but to allow merchants to avoid conflicts when the template embeds an old version of font-awesome which doesn't play well with the latest one embedded in HikaShop.
If you don't have that problem, I would recommend not to change that.
Finally, to change hidden options you need to edit the table hikashop_config via your PHPMyAdmin and change/add entries there. Regarding font-awesome, it would mean adding an entry with the namekey font-awesome-type and the value admin.