Eh, not really. A string with a tab is still hard to tell apart from a string with spaces. Linters don't help there (why would they?). And no way in hell am I going to change Vim to display them differently!
My editor (VSCode) notifies me if I open a file that has any mixed tabs and spaces and offers to fix them all with one click.
> no way in hell am I going to change Vim to display them differently!
Sounds like we've found the problem.