Giving meaning to whitespace causes so many headaches and yet people still embrace Python, for some reason. I don’t understand it.
Braces also allow for easily copying and pasting blocks of code because the braces delimit the semantics of the copied text. Because your code is already indented, with white space indentation you have to check that a) you pasted the first line at the right indentation level b) every subsequent line is also at the right level relative to the first line. No small feat.
Without braces copy-pasting becomes a context-sensitive headache. That's poor usability.
Quite the opposite.
I like to format my code nicely anyways (or rather, mostly my editor does it for me because I’ve asked it to do so).
I indent with two spaces usually, regardless of language. And have my editors configured to insert two spaces when I press tab.
JavaScript, Rust, Python, C. Same difference, in terms of how I use whitespace.
If you're writing well structured, original code in Python, it's generally cleaner and easier than other languages because the syntax avoids ambiguities that other languages have.
Language becomes popular largely through library ecosystem and resources around it, not just how the language looks. I think Google embracing it had a good role in acquiring mind shares.