Python has always cared about formatting. If you feel like you never needed to worry about things like that, it's because someone else already thought long and hard about it, and encoded it in pep8. No need for debates.
Frankly, after having been out of the Python ecosystem for a long time, I'm surprised that something like black ever gained traction, if it really has strayed in any significant sense from pep8.
The entire reason you have been able to ignore stupid formatting debates like this for so long is because of things like pep8 and strict definitions of what entails "Pythonic" code.
Contra the complaints in the article it is not about black ignoring pep8, it is that pep8 has always had some grey areas and some parts that are simply wrong for modern python code. Black has become the defacto gofmt in the python world by just getting the job done. It is strongly opinionated, but most of the areas of contention were either open-ended before or not worth arguing about; at this point most people are willing to relent on the annoyances or minor non-standard bits for the sake of the benefits black brings to a project.
Frankly, after having been out of the Python ecosystem for a long time, I'm surprised that something like black ever gained traction, if it really has strayed in any significant sense from pep8.
The entire reason you have been able to ignore stupid formatting debates like this for so long is because of things like pep8 and strict definitions of what entails "Pythonic" code.
What happened?