You're assuming a relatively high degree of competency and available time on the part of maintainers and it sounds like a reasonably short backlog. That's grea

You're assuming a relatively high degree of competency and available time on the part of maintainers and it sounds like a reasonably short backlog. That's great. For overworked, understaffed teams like a large backlog of reviews it generally doesn't work like that. And for those teams the work done on fixing the formatting issues across their project pays off in velocity because submitters and reviewers stop needing to care about the issue entirely. This is why when people think about submitting a change and they see their editor auto-formatting changed half the lines in the file with whitespace fixes, they get a bad feeling about how submitting anything to the project is going to go.