Ever since Go got big, though, everyone else is discovering how fantastically nice they are, and that’s a good thing.
Now, when you paste code and things are wrong, an auto formatter cleans it up for you. Before, you'd just end up with an unreadable codebase.
It's definitely an odd choice to make now.
If you grab that version and unpack it and look at /OChangelog then it seems to date back until at least 1989, same as Python itself.
That was for C source, of course. I expect there were pre-GNU indent variants, perhaps posted on comp.sources.unix and maybe some commercial things as part of very expensive compiler packages.
I would say that running autoformatters in any kind of routine way was pretty rare. EDIT: but I think ascribing the language design to commonality or not is probably ahistorical. Even today it's a rather passionate debate. And even at the time, Lisp - the poster child of copy-paste friendly PLangs - was routinely autoformatted within Emacs', but that was not enough for people to not find Lisp code "ugly".