There isn't much doubt in my mind that a consistent style helps reading code as you can spend less time parsing the structure of the code and focus more on the

There isn't much doubt in my mind that a consistent style helps reading code as you can spend less time parsing the structure of the code and focus more on the logic. That being said the purely syntactical parts (i.e.: the things taken care of by gofmt and dartfmt) seem like a limitation of storing code as text. If code was stored as an AST, everyone could tailor the rendering (tabs vs space, where brackets go. Whether to put a return on the last line in Kotlin) to however they like and tools like gofmt would be obsolete. That's not to say this approach isn't without its downsides though.