I don't keep examples around to defend my stance on this, sorry.

I left out my largest critique - spacing is semantic both for the compiler and the human.

Often I police the whitespace very thoughtfully usually in code that also requires long comments for clarity.

I care deeply about maintainability and legibility of code and try to consider future human readers everywhere.

Then the formatter says "haha, fuck that!"

That's my biggest personal gripe with it. It's consistency over clarity, conformity over craft.

This all depends on what kind of code you're writing. Standard backend crud code in python with sqlalchemy? ok, pydantic with linters and formatters. But that should be written by llms these days anyways, if you're still doing it by hand you're doing it wrong.

Honestly the jobs I sign up for demand a kind of care - mostly experimental and frontier work, so I am really frustrated when I'm prevented from exercising my professional judgement and doing what I think is best due to some bureaucratic red tape.

I don't want the Wild West, I want disciplined senior engineers using professional consideration and judgement and not a bunch of onerous restricting tools assuming I don't know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it

The language designers, compiler engineers, they are the actually competent people in the room and if they allowed for the flexibility I'll side with them over some hacked out set of rewriting regexs by some kid vibe coding on GitHub

+1 to this. Why throw away an extra dimension of expression available by choices in formatting in the name of consistency? I find it helpful to use blank lines to separate code into "paragraphs". A complex conditional may be made more readable by extra space in some places an not others. A series of single line if statements might be clearer formatted lined up vertically, like a table.