"And if it turns out that you have a team or an organization where people simply do not spend a lot of time thinking or worrying about formatting, then an auto formatter might absolutely outperform the median outcome without it."

I think this is really true - the auto formatter is not the best possible formatting, it's just the baseline level of care that someone bothered to automate. Peak insanity was reading max 80 line length React and i never want to go back to it

This resonates hard with me. At work I slave away under the edicts of the biome linter and I haven’t been able to articulate very well why I hate it so much. I think it comes down to your neighborhood analogy, it feels like consistency is enforced not just on the outside of my house, but inside as well, and I am effectively blocked from making any design decisions it does not agree with. Its opinions are not necessarily bad, but at least half of them I would have preferred to treat as guidelines. (Yes yes, I can //biome-ignore but that is not my idea of a cozy living room nook).

It feels good to see someone finally make this argument on the internet.