I was the same and of the opinion that this was mostly a relic of the past.

Then I was assigned a project where this was enforced in the test suite and had to religiously follow pep8. It took a while to get used to but after a while the benefits (like fitting into everyone's editor configuration, cleaner list comprehensions etc) became apparent.

Now I'm the one to put flake8 as a part of the test suite in any new python project :)