But the tooling for editing the code has no support for indenting blocks as trivially as adding braces.
Sure, you just run clang-format or such on the block/file, and get all the visual stuff sorted out.
The difference is that I can add braces in the middle of multiple lines, just need to get my changes to match up, and then I can tell it to reformat the changed section/the whole file.
For block indenting, I have to select each block I want to operate on before issuing the block indent command.
Braces let me skip the selecting, requiring the same cursor movement but allowing batch insertion of selection begin/end markers, in a sense.