The way you've described it is almost verbatim with how Google's C++ style guide puts it:

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Vertical_W...

Yeah. And when I write comments, I do it in explanation of the chunk of lines below which perform a particular idea. The newline after that chunk is necessary to break up the chunks to give room for another one below, etc.

I really hate the c# code style of a new line for both open and close braces, especially in an if then else statement. Pushes people to use long ternary statements instead.

I prefer ifs to ternarys because, more often than not, I want to easily add and remove statements to the body of the then or else as I'm working things out.