I remember being a new developer and thinking that vertical alignment of code, whilst having some minor upsides, was just too damn ugly to do.

Now I’m much older and the less time I have to spend parsing someone else’s code before I can see if it’s correct or not, the better.

Vertical alignment, the vast majority of the time, does make code vastly easier to read, and although it may have some diff-based downsides, they tend to be one-off rather than perpetual. I know which cost I’d rather bear.