There are tabs people and there are infidels

I was ready to throw some vitriol into your heretical comment and then I remembered I am also a tab person. Nothing to see here, sorry!

I mean my original comment was highlighting that it’s unsolved and it instantly started infighting so I think my point has been proven

People should recognize that tabs vs. spaces is more a question of editing (e.g.: What happens when you press Backspace behind an indentation? Does the caret move at uniform speed on key repeat or does it suddenly jump in places?) than of stored representation. You could even have an editor/viewer that lets you choose the display-width of spaces at the start of lines.

Do tab users not realise they could configure their editor to auto-indent and delete multiple characters so they could move to the most superior spaces format?

I don’t know of an editor who can fully emulate Tab behavior using a spaces representation (and vice versa), but it would certainly be possible.