Oh, absolutely. I started writing Python professionally in 2010. Whenever a new group of people started working on a Python project, one of the first things they had to decide was tabs versus spaces. Everyone would begin by saying that the question was unimportant and silly, but then immediately add a “but” followed by a detailed justification of their personal preference. That would lead to people spending two full days exchanging arguments and links to blog posts.

Worse, sometimes you would start working on a project without having that discussion first, only to discover a few days later that the code was failing because different people had different indentation settings in their IDEs, both regarding tabs versus spaces and the number of spaces. You would then have to pause the work, go back, have the discussion, and decide who was going to fix all the code committed so far.

This only stopped when linters became popular. They may be a little like vaccines: when they work, you do not see them working, so it is easy to forget what things were like before. But believe me, when they appeared, they were a breath of fresh air. We could finally focus on discussing the work rather than the conventions.

And tabs versus spaces is only one example. There used to be PR discussions about countless style issues throughout the entire lifetime of a project. That was not entirely unreasonable, because a consistent style genuinely makes a project easier to work on. But when every individual convention has to be negotiated by humans, it takes enormous amounts of energy and becomes tedious very quickly.

Yes, also at workplaces I saw these discussions in the past. These discussions almost completely disappeared when formatters became popular.