Specifically for reviewing a pull request in GitHub, wouldn't the "Hide whitespace" setting reduce some of this noise? I could be mistaken, though, but that's how I interpreted that setting.
For example, if someone changes:
function isUserBanned(username) {
return db.findUserByName(username)?.banned;
}
function isUserBanned(username) {
return
db.findUserByName(username)?.banned;
}
Also, adding braces from the start means that adding one new line of code is a one-line patch, instead of a four-line one - I do that for the same reason that I always put trailing commas on my array definitions
On the flipside, having three trivial early-return ifs at the beginning of a function will become 9 lines long with braces instead of 6 (or just 3, when doing single-line ifs). Very often, such cases never expand to multiple lines in the future.