I think that those people will acknowledge that the formatting of the code is secondary to its working--once it works, the whitespace is just a matter of making it more presentable.
If you had working code--and it was elegant, and easy to maintain, and fixed a real problem--I find it unlikely that you were put down by people that really grok being a hacker. I'm sorry for your experience there.
And before you point out that that definition allows me to neatly exclude the people that make hackers look bad--well, that's kinda the point. Similarly, I try not to judge all MRAs by the ones that make death threats, nor feminists by those that are rabidly opposed to transwomen.
Your perspective here is absurdly reductionist and doesn’t reflect any reality anyone lives in. It’s not that simple, it just is not.
These are the people arguing about fucking spaces vs tabs and you are going to try to honestly tell me that all that matters is whether the code works. Are you serious?! Like, actually, really serious?