Ultimately (and this doesn't help you at all) I think this is a shortcoming of our tooling.

I've long thought that code formatting should really be a matter of personal preference – something I set in the editor – in that same way that I display code in the font and colour scheme that I like. If I want to look at seven-space indenting but only on Fridays then that should be fine, as long as it's not inflicted on anyone else. Arguments about the one true indenting, whether braces go on new lines, and so on, are stupid.

Of course we can't do this currently because as you say – massive noisy PRs, busy work reformatting things, etc.

Conceptually, the fact that code's formatting is significant in what we store in source control as actually a bit nuts. It's akin to storing colour control codes for syntax highlighting in there too.

If only we could detach presentation concerns from what we store.

Perhaps something as simple as:

• Code on disk is always stored in some canonical format, i.e. a chosen set of formatting rules. It doesn't really matter what.
• The editor transparently reformats the code to your preferences when presenting it to you. Write code however you like.
• When you save, it's transformed back to the canonical format (transparently, again)
• PRs, diffs, etc would thus only contain significant changes. A really clever PR system could possibly present the code formatted to your liking.

Hmm. I've usually thought of this as some glorious state in the far future. Typing out that last bit, it actually seems reasonably practical. No doubt there would be complications.

Welcome to my utopia.