I'm amazed that your comment is the single reasonable take among this entire discussion full of unsupported assertions and opinions.

Having two different invisible characters to represent empty space is objectively worse. Just use space, and the tab key to insert multiple spaces. Simple. Use .editorconfig and a formatter to enforce the commonly accepted standard. Done.

Sadly you still have to make exceptions for Makefile, Go, etc. that expect a mixture of hard tabs and spaces. Otherwise hard tabs are not allowed in the codebases I manage, and are replaced by the formatter.