If using getOrElse in one function and using an if in another is confusing, I am very sorry: things differ, things change, and its best to just learn to read code.
When engineers tell me these sorts of style changes confuse them, I think lesser of them. It's probably not socially acceptable to say, but there it is.
if the same thing is being done in two different ways, you have to actually read and think about the both chunks of code to see that they're the same.
with consistent style you can essentially speed-read a codebase because things are predictable.
with inconsistent style, you're constantly reading slightly-different pieces of code and figuring out "is this different purely for style reasons, or was there a reason that one section if different?"
Interesting.
Just to be consistent with the rest of the internet.
It's like reading a book with no paragraphs. Of course you can do it. Nobody is "confused" by the lack of paragraphs. But you're an idiot if you think paragraphs don't matter, or don't make reading easier.
I tend to think less of people that don't understand this, or don't care.
Finding code that suddenly zigs where all the rest of the systems code zags takes extra mental overhead. It's annoying, and misleading. All too frequently bugs are coupled to such style violations, adding extra frustration around such misleading code.
That's a really good point actually. Style violations can make the code look like it does something that it doesn't, `if (a=b)`, missing curly brackets in C/C++, missing semicolons in Javascript, mismatched brackets, etc. An autoformatter can make it more obvious when you've done something wrong.