[contravariant]

Not sure if saying you can't use dynamic programming is accurate though, you simply can't use a direction translation of Knuth's algorithm since this misses indentation.

If I recall correctly Knuth uses Dijkstra on a graph with nodes of 'line break at position x' and I don't see why you couldn't use a graph consisting of 'line break at position x indentation y' or something similar.

[svat]

It's the "or something similar" that's the catch. For another example, search the post for `scriptLoadingTimeout` — to know how to indent the code after a break immediately after that position, you need to know the indentation of the `.timeout` before it, of the immediately preceding `.then(`, and of the `return` at the top — basically you need to know the indentation level of every parent in the expression tree. That means the graph's states are something like "line break at position x, with indentation of parent expression nodes being …, …, …", and then you have too many states as mentioned in the post. There's a combinatorial explosion of the state space. Using dynamic programming with this large state space is still possible, but approaches the running time of the brute-force algorithm. (I do wonder how extensively it was tried, though.)