One of my first jobs was a small software company writing software for a small number of clients, in MS basic PDS.

The lead developer didn't like to bother with formatting code, so I wrote a tool called makenice to format his nasty spaghetti gibberish into something with good indents and layout to make it easier for us normal people to parse.

He was furious, literally spun in circles about it right in the office in front of everyone, so I wrote makenasty to format code into the way he appeared to like.

I only shared makenasty/nice with a couple of the team, who loved it, as it allowed easy conversion between something readable and something the team lead like.

He never knew about makenasty.

Outside of the naming - this is a perfectly sane thing to do for developer comfort and can usually be accomplished with simple transformations.

There are often limitations (like manually added indentation/spacing for alignment) but as long as you're very intentional about what changes you'll allow and have a good understanding of the language it can be an extremely safe operation.

If he didn't bother formatting code, it would seem impossible to create a tool that formatted code the way he preferred.

reminds me of rob pike mentioning gofmt's style is "no one's favorite"

I find a lot of these conflicts I can't resolve when everybody agrees that the pain of ugly/unnecessary diffs is greater than the pain of minor formatting disagreements.

This kind of passive-aggressive bullshit is exactly what's wrong with tech. People don't decide things: they just passively resist, and authority ends up being a muddle of truncated information flows.