I care a lot about formatting, but I agree in finding it weird that people jump to the white space thing as a notable thing about Python readability. My Python code is formatted basically the same as my curly-brace-language code. The reason Python is highly readable is that you can write code that you can read out loud and basically get an English sentence that describes what it does. Who cares about how the parser works?
when you use a text editor like vim it’s a lot easier to hop around closing braces and brackets than whitespace
for instance i have a macro that immediately creates a new line and closing brace when I define new functions in certain languages, what does that even look like in python? havent figured that out yet
not even to mention debugging indentation problems is way harder visually than with brackets, I can count left brackets and right brackets and immediately determine something doesnt add up, with whitespace, far less obvious you’ve made a mistake there, which is a big issue when triaging something whilst very tired and overworked
I find it far more of an annoyance in yaml than python though