Comment by buttercraft

I've inherited many sloppily formatted code bases that all contained mistakes which blended into the mess. Consistently styled code has the nice property that certain types of mistakes stand out immediately.

For example, there's a large chunk of code following an if statement, but it's indented the same as the body of the if. The dev overlooks the closing brace and puts the logic in the wrong place. Additionally, there is a nested if statement whose body is indented less than the surrounding code. It's hard to read, and error prone.

I can't imagine a "good" developer putting up with that, although I admit you don't have to be "fastidious" to prevent this type of thing.