But newlines + indentation are supported by a lot of languages & when it is, it’s easier to read since the prevailing convention is already to newline, then in indent. When you follow the usual coding styles or autoformatted & removed the semicolons, you’ve gained nothing for readability & added noise. I much prefer the languages that take this convention & bake it in so you don’t have to have that that visual noise—and in these languages, I never felt the parsing rules were ambiguous.

Why haven't custom parsers become more of a thing? All the compiler or interpreter really needs is a valid parse tree. You could even have some kind of special command or directive to switch styles, if a section would be really ugly otherwise.

With indentation-based languages the bad coding style we are talking about is putting multiple statements on a line or unindenting a block …& never has that been something I wanted to do. I would rather this aspect be enforced at the language for readability where there is still room in all other aspects to try out other styles.