so you're basically saying "look this is neat and I like it, but since we cannot prevent some future chap come along and make a mess of it, let's stop this nonsense, now, and throw our hands up in the air—thoughts and prayers is what I say!"?

At best I'd say it's ok to use it sparingly, in places where it really does make an improvement in readability. I've seen people use it just to align the right hand side of a list of assignments, even when there is no tabular nature to what they are assigning.