A single-author novel can have personality. A 100-author 30-volume encyclopedia, less so. Whenever I set up a new single-author codebase, I set up as little automatic code formatting as I please. For collaborating with other developers, I will enforce as much as possible as early as possible.
The formatter has no opinion. It follows rules. It doesn't work perfectly everywhere. It works enough. I would argue caring about exact bespoke spacing of all code is the perfectionism you mention.
The IDE should apply user formatting preferences upon reading in the file, and apply the std formatting while writing it (with the aim of having diffs work well). That would make good use of auto-formatters.
It's in precisely zero ways like communism and that really doesn't help the clarity of the rest of your post.
Perhaps you do not remember reading through 10k lines of PHP source that has been formatted by someone who has entirely different ideas about what good formatting is than almost everyone else on earth (or perhaps you never have!), but if you did remember the advantage of a single formatting standard that is ubiquitous would be very clear.
1. it makes it just plain easier to read others code. it's hard enough to have to grasp the logic behind everything, if they have wildly different formatting on top of that it gets substantially worse (incidentally, this was given as one of the reasons why go was such a success in the open source world).
2. i've been able to get a couple of archaic linter rules dropped, i.e. the brackets around single statement conditionals.
// for this reason brackets were mandatory
if (a == b)
doSomething();
doSomethingElse();
It’s soulless to make all code look like bland corporate cardboard. It appeals to our OCD perfectionist tendencies but in my experience provides very little real value. Software is like writing. It can’t help but express how the author thinks about their code. These tools try to iron that personality out - and for what reason? Who cares in javascript if some files use semicolons and some don’t? Who cares if my where clause is on the same line or the next? The compiler doesn’t care, and neither do I.
(I will grant that all files in a project should have consistent white space, but you don’t need cargo fmt for that.)