Google doesn't use Git internally, and its code search and source control tools expose the concept of "show blame before this change", so in practice reformats like this aren't troublesome with regard to blame.
This is true but I think it would still be nice for VCS to have a first class concept of "peek through" changes (whitespace, formatting, etc.) for the purpose of blame.
Blame can be configured to ignore cleanups like this.
This has always been something I use to argue against just reformatting code in isolation. TIL git provides a way to ignore that. Thanks!
Not git, but yes, it did mess up the blame lines. Luckily most people don't care about the attribution on BUILD files. But I did get the occasional email for years afterward about "hey looks like you added this build target, can you explain it?" or just an automated tool deciding I was the last person who edited the file so I was a good reviewer for a future change. Those pings were a fun tour of directories I'd never heard of (but did edit). Been a few years since I got one of those.