Once you have mixed tabs and spaces, everything goes to hell because now that code's formatting is tied to a specific person's idea of how many spaces should a tab display as, or whether tabs refer to tab stops or just a fixed number of spaces.
I never had strong feelings about it until encountering some really pathological code bases, which had gotten to the point where there was literally no valid tab->spaces setting that would make everything look correct.
Ultimately, though, these things really just don't matter. I use 4 spaces per indent level, but it's not like I'm incapable of reading and writing code that uses tabs, or 2 spaces, or 8 spaces. Really the only thing that matters is that there is a standard and that it is consistently applied within a project.