> this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career
I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.
What is "back in the day" here? I've been in this field for like 16 years.
Others may remember it differently, but I feel like things started to change somewhere between 2009 to 2012? People were still hand-indenting code back then, and your personal style felt like something you had a bit of ownership of or was a creative outlet for you. I think we are in a much better place now where the editor + a central config file owns the whole thing, and I'd be surprised to see a modern codebase where a formatter's defaults weren't being used.