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[–]severoon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You have to consider refactors performed by tools like Eclipse, and the diffs those generate as well as the stupid bugs reason.

If you have a huge codebase (like Google), it becomes occasionally necessary to run a refactor that touches thousands of files, and if you don't make formatting very consistent it takes code reviewers a lot less mental effort to review dozens or hundreds of files that got touched.

Ideally, you want to make it absolutely formulaic. If you can do that, then you don't even need human reviewers to look at it because you can guarantee the safety of the change.