I enjoyed reading this and it made me think it would have been nicer if tabs had won in the end. My best guess for why is that 'replace all tabs with x spaces'

I enjoyed reading this and it made me think it would have been nicer if tabs had won in the end. My best guess for why is that 'replace all tabs with x spaces' is marginaly easier to automate than the (also pretty easy to automate) 'replace all groups of x spaces with tabs'. Ultimately, tabs may have been a better default, but having a default in the first place has way more benefits than spaces vs tabs offer in their own right.