Ludicrous, nope, it's the standard. See: linux kernel. To quote from the coding style:

"Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3."[1]

If it works for a multi-million line C code base like the linux kernel withou any real problem, then it's definitely not ludicrous.

If you find yourself indenting too much, then write some helper functions.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...