Yes. Not just that, but those developers then add these tools to be enforced in their CI pipeline because "It's good to be consistent", and if that tool occasionally barfs out something extremely suboptimal, that's just the cost of consistency.

I'm sensing some sarcasm, but I want to go on record and say I actually completely agree with this message.

My time working in Go with its institutionalised gofmt was a blessing.

Haha, I've always found that me and those CI checks get along pretty well 70% of the time, I made a mistake 20% of the time, and an ignore flag handles the remainder.

I'd argue that's more likely a deficiency of the tool, as well as the fact that consistency just isn't the best solution in all cases.

> Is using auto-formatting tools particularly widespread? Don't most people just format the code to their liking as they write it? Am I completely off base here?

It's everywhere in the javascript world. I started using it a few years ago and would never go back. Having a consistent formatting when working with a team is great and it comes at basically no costs.

And for the few exceptions where the auto-formatted code is harder to read, it can be disabled by a comment.