Sad that it is configurable, though. The biggest benefit of its predecessors such as gofmt is that they are not configurable, leading to a much more uniform formatting style and avoiding endless discussions about whitespace layout.
The gofmt argument isn't the final word here. There's plenty of Go users who don't like gofmt's style, so they just don't use gofmt. It's easy to imagine other users who don't like gofmt's style, and don't like being pressured to use it, so they just don't use Go at all. How is that any better than just having a configurable tool with sane defaults? It's one thing for a tool to be opinionated; it's another thing entirely to be dictatorial and stubbornly inflexible.
Man, there's something cathartic in seeing your industry and self-identified group's ridiculousness aired for all the world to see.
Obviously the proliferation of coding formatting styles. It's not we didn't have "official styles" and formatting tools before for other languages.
The greatness of gofmt, and what people love it for, is how it killed all other options.
To take a concrete example, adopting gofmt's choice to not have a line length limit would have been a nonstarter, because lots of code out there uses long expressions manually wrapped to be readable. A lot of the work in rustfmt has gone into playing nicely with community conventions like these.
To break lines, the formatter would have to refactor code, which is not desiderable.
The defaults are what's considered the "official" style; we expect the vast majority of people to use it. Defaults are powerful.
Programming causes me a lot of eye strain as it is, a configurable syntax formatter really does help.
I never see anyone discuss syntax the way you're describing. Not at work, not online. Actually the only place I see it is when discussing what the default is, so I think having a default is far more likely to cause those discussions as people will have more reason to complain.
To get the default formatting with rustfmt, you just run it. You can configure it via some file but I've never needed to. I don't even know what the options are.