Last time OpenSSL was in the news for a bug that should generate a warning I took a cursory look at some of the code, it was stuffed with stuff that would generate similar warnings. So at that time I concluded that going through all the warnings would be a pretty big job, and that is likely why nobody did so. On the more speculative front, it might be that some maintainer is against taking whitespace patches, that would probably make anyone who tries give up pretty quickly.

I'm a bit skeptical of the claim "The code quality is excellent", if it was this would be a lone warning emitted by the compiler, and surely it would have been fixed then.