While I think there’s value in tooling that tidies these things up automatically, I agree that enforcing CI rules around these is a waste of time.

I think so many engineers have been burned by bad code that we now instinctively latch onto anything that appears to quantitatively improve the code, but then get so focused on those metrics that the real fundamental problems are ignored.

So we end up running around in circles pleasing CI instead of spending that time thinking more about the architecture and patterns that make code bad.

Code quality theatre.