Yea, in the 90s significant whitespace seemed great because it meant that you got readable code. The amount of code that you might see copy/pasted with terrible formatting/indentation in other languages could make you want to scream.

Now, when you paste code and things are wrong, an auto formatter cleans it up for you. Before, you'd just end up with an unreadable codebase.

It's definitely an odd choice to make now.