As @rockostrich and @fragmede pointed out, I'm talking about whitespace having parsing impact ("significant whitespace"), not just any whitespace. The fact that

As @rockostrich and @fragmede pointed out, I'm talking about whitespace having parsing impact ("significant whitespace"), not just any whitespace. The fact that extra spaces changes the structure of the output seems like a total minefield to me, unless your config is being machine generated (in which case there are many more robust formats to choose).