> When this is brought up, people [...] don't seem to acknowledge that this is not a problem with any other language.

This was a deliberate design decision by andrew for all zig pre-1.0 to supress discussions about coding style (use CR, LF, CRLF, LFCR as a line ending? tabs vs. spaces? ...) as it's considered bike shedding

Zig 1.0 won't have this restrictions anymore. More information can be found here:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544