My point is that by closing optional tags you can introduce subtle bugs into your layout that might take some time to find and browser won't be of any help. You write closing tag, browser will implicitly add starting tag. It's better to memorise which tags are optional and do not close them at all.

You can also introduce subtle bugs by not closing them. Or forgetting which tags can be closed and thus leaving the wrong ones dangling.

So I think your argument here is tough to take at face value. It feels a lot more like you’re arguing personal preference as fact.

Precisely, it's an added burden to remember and what might be skipped. The less many exception, the better.

Though if a linter is formatting the whole codebase on its own in an homogeneous way, and someone else will deal with the added parsing complexity, that might feel okayish also to me.

Generally speaking, the less clutter the better. A bit like with a js codebase which is semicolon free where possible.

For pleasant experience of read and write, html in a simple text editor is very low quality. Pug for example is bringing far less clutter, though mandatory space indentation could be avoided with some alternative syntactic choices.