In books, you typically start from the beginning and read to the end. You consume the book serially and the only breaks you are concerned about are pauses (period, comma, colon, etc.) and page breaks (chapters).
In code, you typically scan. Scanning a book is a painful experience. The sentences never start in the same spot. In code, the heirarchcal structure and text layout helps for scanning and identifying quickly. As someone said previously in this thread, cookbooks are done the same way and for the same reasons.
Also, even without an editor, the cleanliness pays off. And you would indent properly anyway...
Isn't that how we write cooking recipes?
Your comparison with novels I think is a bit skewed. Literature has a whole different set of readability enhancements such as fully justified text, variable-width fonts, as well as margins and padding. Punctuation in English has been evolving for centuries as people settle on the minimum needed to convey the full meaning as unambiguously as possible. But English also has many many more sets of valid (as well as various definitions of valid) constructs than Javascript does and thus may require a more robus set of punctuation.