Why is this flagged? I completely agree.

99% the linter is not enforcing correctness in my experience. It's just enforcing a bunch of subjective aesthetic constraints. Which import order, max number of empty lines between statement, what type of string literal to use, no trailing white space, etc. A non trivial part of my day is spent dealing with this giant catalog of dinner etiquette. Not all of it is auto fixable. Also, there are plenty of situations where everyone would agree that violating the rule is necessary (eg. "no use before define" but you need mutual recursion). Also sometimes rules are circularly in conflict (eg you have to change a line but there is no way to do it without violating the max-line-length rule).

If your linter is enforcing subjective aesthetic constraints, then I'd argue it's not really a linter but a formatter at that point, and it should be automatically fixing all that stuff for you rather than have you do that manually. Things like import order, empty lines, white space etc can all be fixed automatically in most languages I've worked with.

Linters enforcing rules that need to be broken is a pet peeve of mine, and I agree with you there. Most linters allow for using comments to explicitly exclude certain lines from being linted. This should ~never be necessary. If it is regularly necessary, then either you're programming bad (always a possibility!) or the rule has too many false positives and you should remove it.

Does your linter not have a fix command for things like import order? Does your editor not auto trim white space?

To be frank, everyone I've worked with that complained about the linter didn't know much about their tooling. They didn't know about the fix command (even though I put it in the readme and told them about it), they didn't know how to turn on lintfix and prettier on save, wouldn't switch on git hooks and didn't know their lint failed until GitHub said so, and none of the people like this were so productive that it made up for this trait.