Raymond Hettinger talks about this in "Beyond PEP8", which is one of my favorite conference talks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

That's a great talk. Thanks for sharing it.

He does well to explain how PEP 8 can be good but some people focus on it because they may not have experience to contribute otherwise.

That talk is fantastic, and I don’t even write Python. Thanks for sharing!

Another challenge is that it's very easy to think you understand the rationale behind the rules well before you actually grok them.

At work I learned a theoretical set of best practices for the software we integrate with. I was very enthusiastic about applying them. This caused me to learn the real set of best practices, mostly leaning on the stuff that works most robustly (even to recreate other features, usually ones that prove inflexible when pushed).

especially when there are too many such rule lists often contridicting with each other. Finding the right list becomes the key for someone (beginner to a domain) who has to follow the rules. That's just luck.

It’s even more implicit than that. For example there are social criteria and considerations of vanity.

Another example is that I recently wrote a comment that received greater than 10 votes and was flagged (I presume by users) almost immediately. The comment was thus both commonly agreeable (perhaps people could empathize to the subject matter) and yet a violation of social norms. An unspoken social rule violation.

That comment also received contradictory responses: I’m not woke, but.... Contradictory responses are generally an explicit mention of internal confusion where the person cannot even agree with themselves on social conformance: I’m not lying, but.... If it’s not complete bullshit then don’t posture with a qualifier.