In addition to what @derefr said, in order to not want automatic formatting, first you have to get to the place where zero people in your team/company care about formatting & whitespace at all. Disagreements over whitespace consume people time, and those disagreements go away when automated formatting is used. This is the strongest reason in my experience to use automatic formatting: to eliminate time spent talking about formatting.
Auto-formatting tools in editors exist, and they're very common, and they're not always configured properly, so people change formatting on accident. Sometimes formatting changes can cause code reviews to take more time than necessary. Having tabs in code can cause actual problems, for example, since tabs aren't the same size everywhere.
This is not just a code understanding problem, and shouldn't be written off as trivial, IMO.
Auto-formatting tools in editors exist, and they're very common, and they're not always configured properly, so people change formatting on accident. Sometimes formatting changes can cause code reviews to take more time than necessary. Having tabs in code can cause actual problems, for example, since tabs aren't the same size everywhere.
This is not just a code understanding problem, and shouldn't be written off as trivial, IMO.