The effort:reward ratio is still out of whack here, though. Linters are relatively limited in usefulness at the best of times (compared to tests, for instance).

Linters that can't rank rule violations sensibly, have bad defaults and opinionated stylistic rules quickly become more trouble than they're worth.

If somebody comes out with a better linter, though, that isn't verbose and just catches truly problematic code consistently without needing a ton of customization, I'll use that for sure.