In my brief experiments with Flutter, I must admit I didn't enjoy the experience of using the autoformatting. Not knocking the author of the tool at all, I can definitely see how absurdly hard it is to create something that does what it is trying to do. And I'm not against autoformatting in general either. I think gofmt works much better, and that's in large part because it tries to do less.

With dart, I felt that very often, when time I saved a file after editing (which activated the formatter), the code would jump around a lot, even for very small edits sometimes. I actually found myself saving less often, as I found the sudden reorganizing kind of jarring and disorienting.

Most of this, I felt like came from this wish of making the formatter keep lines inside a given width. While that's a goal I appreciate, I've come to think is one of those things that's better done manually. The same goes for the use of whitespace in general, other than trivial stuff like consistent indentation. There's actual, important meaning that can be conveyed in how you arrange things which I think is more important than having it always be exactly mathematically consistent.

It's one of the reasons I still prefer ESLint over Prettier in JS land, also, even for stylistic rules. The fact that Prettier always rewrites the entire file from scratch with the parsed AST often ends up mangling some deliberate way that I'd arrange the code.