I agree with this up to a point - having consistent code style with some sort of formatter (gofmt, black, clang-format) goes a long way to reducing complexity of understanding because it unifies visual style.
I suggest that a codebase should read like a newspaper. While there is room for op-eds in the paper, it's not all op-eds, everything else should read as a single voice.
My experience is that projects which value code formatters (and similar rulemaking) tend strongly not to have room for "op-eds", FWIW. And conversely the code bases I've seen with the best/cleanest/most-clearly-expressive code tend strongly to be the ones with fewer rules.
I think the one exception there is in some open source contexts (Linux is the archetype) which receive a fire hose of submissions of questionable quality and maintainership. There, you can use adherence to arbitrary rules as a proxy measurement[1] for attention and effort on the part of the submitter. And that I have no problem with.
But the actual value of code formatters is IMHO extremely low in practice, and the cost isn't "high", but is non-trivial.
I suggest that a codebase should read like a newspaper. While there is room for op-eds in the paper, it's not all op-eds, everything else should read as a single voice.