His alignment formatting example is harder for me to read than what he started with. I have an eye tracking issue so I'm not always the best person to judge this. Is it harder for everyone else?
Just to confirm that there are people who agree with the author: this tidbit actually kept me reading the article! It was the new eMacs thing I learned today. I thought it was much easier to read after aligning. As long as things stay within a reasonable width, that brand of consistency (read “columns”) makes it easier for me to read.
I like seeing assignments like this being aligned too but it's not great if you care about minimizing the number of lines that code reviewers will read when you make a change that introduces a new variable whose length is longer than any existing ones (or removing the longest one).
I also dislike that style, I appreciate it looks nicer, but I definitely find it harder to process/read. That example isn't that bad, because all the variable names are pretty close to the same length.
But once you start mixing reallyLongVariableNamesLikeThisOne and shortOnes, the distance between the short variable name and the value is long enough that there's a chance I'll look at the wrong value or something.
I'm glad that automated formatters/linters pretty much all remove/complain about that stuff now days.
I was a bit surprised that the numbers didn’t get right-aligned:
one = 1
fortyTwo = 42
elite = 1337
To answer your question, I tend to agree that it gets harder to read the wider the horizontal spacing is, unless the relation between the values in the same column is very important.