The counter-argument is that in practice, most programmers use the indentation of the first non-whitespace character on each line to estimate lexical scopes, wh

The counter-argument is that in practice, most programmers use the indentation of the first non-whitespace character on each line to estimate lexical scopes, which is why removing all indenting drives most programmers wild. I've seen several bugs in C++ and Java where colleagues have indented the code for the correct control flow, but misplaced the curly braces, resulting in incorrect flow. Granted, the two bugs that come to mind first are dangling-else problems that were fixed by inserting the optional braces. I think that you and I both prefer auto-formatters to force indenting to match flow control. However, there's an argument to be made for actually enforcing it at the language level rather than at the tooling level.