I honestly don't understand this. The syntax is one of the most boring parts of a programming language. It is solved by the IDE (and now LLMs). I don't care about syntax, I care about what I can build. Since the beginning of time people argue about things like tabs vs. spaces, or the dollar sign and I honestly don't understand why that is. It just doesn't matter.

Just to be clear: consistency does very much matter. The mental load of reading totally different styles of code is awful and a waste of energy.

Readability (and hence, maintainability) is definitely a factor in decisions like this. In the particular case of the pipe operator though, the article does mention something it lets you do that you couldn't do before: in a context where only an expression is allowed (such as match), you can now do things that previously would not have worked because it would have required temporary variables.