[oblvious-earth]

While I completely agree with all your other reasoning. It should be pointed out that PEP 8 is not intended to be a styling guide for user code, it's intended to be a styling guide for the standard library: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#introduction

It's nice the broader Python community generally agrees with PEP 8 but it's always a little weird to see it referenced as an authority on styling user code when it is not it's intention and does not claim to be.

[musicale]

I've had various issues with PEP 8, but mixing underscores and camelcase (in particular) has never sparked joy for me.

And pylint seems to keep adding style checks that I don't like and have to disable.

But the main principle I do agree with is to strive for consistent style within a code base.

[antihero]

One thing I liked about Python was that PEP8 existed and was some sort of fairly aged standard for formatting. I’m not sure why people feel under deviation to suit their personal preferences is more valuable than consistency.

[andreareina]

Consistency is not in and of itself valuable. What is valuable is when it makes things clearer, or otherwise easier. Tabs vs spaces has absolutely no effect on my comprehension of the code. Being able to use spaces for alignment would actually help in some cases but oh well, that's not allowed in python. The way black splits [] expressions is actually harmful when it's used in a chain with method calls as is not uncommon in pandas.

[tda]

to anyone with even the slightest levels of OCD,(like say 95%? of software developers) consistency for the sake of consistency has a lot of value. The reason I like Black is not because of the authors opinions, but because it is consistent (due to the absence of configuration/user preferences).