Formatters also do a poor job if your language is flexible and expressive. Great for go, but if your language is the kind that easily supports internal DSLs, formatters are not even helpful at making the code regular
What's your definition of "trivial style nonsense"? Is it "something I personally don't understand or care"?
Things like tabs vs spaces is important, and so is how many spaces an indentation level should take. This affects how editors reformat code, how other people's editors present the code, and even how many lines a commit has and is blamed for a change.
That's why linters are of critical importance to a team, and so is adopting a shared standard and editor config.
The only people who don't understand the importance of a style guide and how to make it a non-issue by enforcing tools to enforce it are those with little to no experience working with software.
Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". No business objective will go unachieved because some checkins use tabs and others use spaces.
Whatever problem style issues might cause can be resolved before lunch by running a formatter and committing the result.
blame.ignoreRevsFile
This is simply false, as attested by the huge volume of comments in this thread by those with actual professional experience working on real-world software projects.
You're also oblivious to the problem domain, because otherwise you'd understand that the critical problems are not whether a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol, but all the churn that is required to manually address style problems in PRs.
Try to think about the problem. You post a PR that screws up all formatting. It takes time for a team member to review a PR. Once you start to get reviews,you notice comments pointing out failures in complying with a specific style. Whether you go the passive-aggressive path of waiting for any other team member to review your code or you do the right thing and fix the problems you introduced, that requires another round of PR reviews. The time that you take with each iteration is the time your work is delayed to be merged. Now think about how many hours per month you waste just because you can't manage to format your code properly.
I sort of agree with GP in that the discussions are a waste of time. I also agree with you that you should simply automate it through tools. Styling doesn’t have to be a democracy or about personal preference, all styles work, it’s all about picking one and then forcing everyone to use it. Of course you do it in a much more involving process than what I make it sound like here, but ultimately someone with decision making powers is going to have to lock down the process so no further time is wasted on it.
We did have some outside contractors who didn't get it at first, but after several of their submissions were rejected (with potential financial penalties) they got onboard and followed the guidelines we had sent them. "These people mean it."
I'm curious why you think this would happen... I would imagine that their comments will now have be to about things that matter, and if they are unhelpful they will stand out more.
It is not obvious that an actual code change is of poor quality.
To show that takes infinitely more experience, work to analyse all the direct and indirect ramifications of both the original and proposed approaches, capacity to push back and decide that your own engineering judgement is equal or better than whoever is purporting to correct you, willingness to suffer everyone else accusing you of arrogance for that on top.
Even with all of that, it's a lot harder to prove the valueless comment is valueless because the more you know, the more you know that practically every single line of code could be done 30 other ways with some valid argument for each one.
It's completely insidious both for the junior and the senior.
The junior has no way to know the junk comment is junk. So they internalize the comment and everyone is worse for it.
The senior has it almost worse. They know enough to know they don't know everything and the comment might be valid, so they put in all kinds of work to try to figure out if they actually missed something, did they have point etc. Maybe in the end the code doesn't end up as bad as the junior just rolling over, but it sucked for everyone and the challenge was not really an intentional productive crucible, it was just a douche that everyone had to waste time and energy taking seriously.
Only someone who actually is arrogant (whatever level, whichever side of the pr) has it easy. Again bad for everyone except them maybe.
It’s not necessarily even bad if there is no meaningful leadership above or alongside the junior. The fast-rising junior may end up hiring developers who are more assertive and still capable.