To some, significant indentation is better.
Others — too used to braces — miss them dearly in Python.
Next ones, vie for the non-text source code, something to get us past these discussions altogether (editors working on .pyc files directly?).
For programs to be maintained, they need to be read, understood and improved. One—often undervalued—skill in programming is to write beautiful code, because that is more art than craft. And unfortunately, tools like Black prohibit the true artists from expressing themselves clearly with code formatting too. And to those, white-space or braces matters on a different level, and everything else is attempting to make up excuses for why one is better than other.
And while conceptual operations we do on the code seem simple on the surface, devising an editing tool that would do semantic operations on the AST is fricking hard and likely to be very non-ergonomic. Look at all the attempts to make code refactoring tooling: it's crazily complex and confusing that it's simpler to just go and grep for a string and fix anything you find.
As long as it's faster to use regular editing operations to shuffle code around, indent or unindent it (or wrap it with braces), tweak one thing here or there, simple text editors will mostly rule the world of programming.