There are two issues with such alignment that may make the "less readable" version a bit better despite being, indeed, arguably less readable: - a modification

There are two issues with such alignment that may make the "less readable" version a bit better despite being, indeed, arguably less readable: - a modification might lead you to realign several lines, making diffs noisier (though you can ignore white-spaces when displaying diffs, but the commits still hold these lines making navigating in the history less straightforward - we all have our own preferences wrt alignment, and your way of aligning or what you decide to align might be different from someone else, and this can lead to friction Worse is probably better here, as much as I like aligned stuff, I think black is right in this case :-)