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I'm really starting think there are a lot of people who think "programming" is mindlessly copypasting snippets off somewhere until something works. And they don't like significant whitespace because it reduces the chances of randomly copypasted stuff doing something.

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This is what is generally called a straw man logical fallacy. The issue is that something as simple as copying and pasting code (say from one file to another, both of which the programmer has written) is made excessively complex due to whitespace being significant. Call it code smell or developer smell or keyboard smell or whatever you want but this issue simply does not exist for programming languages that do not have whitespace significance.

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