The point is not that its layout is better than yours. It is that the layout stops being a decision. Once a formatter runs on every save, nobody adjusts spacing by hand and no pull request contains a change that happened because two editors wrapped a line differently.
A formatter reads the whole file and prints it back out, so it cannot contradict itself. That is the structural difference from a linter, which evaluates rules one at a time and can hold two that disagree. It is also why formatters have very few options: each one added is a decision every team using it then has to make.
Updated August 2026