If you have effective syntax highlighting the benefit in his trivial example disappears. In cases like that you can quickly scan up a line of numbers because they appear very different from the identifiers and it does not matter if they are lined up.

Though such a solution has exactly the same edge case as vertical alignment: when the identifier lengths are very different things get hard to read. In which case it seems much more useful to be able to easily match identifier with value, rather than be able to scan values.

This is just me taking issue with the trivial example though. Even though it seems to be impossible to get a whole team to set up their formatters the right way, vertical formatting is pretty much a must for tabular data like 2D arrays.

(On a different note I am pretty sure that the kernel style guide is one of the most controversial in widespread use. It works because it is very strictly enforced. Not a good place to draw examples from)