I can count multiple reasons why someone might dislike significant whitespace. The most evident is that whitespace is... not evident at all! By definition, it's a transparent character: it's extremely difficult to directly count spaces; they can be indirectly counted by comparison with text in the surrounding area. The same principle why we add commas or apostrophes or spaces every 3 digits in big numbers.

As of the "you're going to indent your code anyway" claim, this seems to completely ignore one-liners, either embedded in other documents (onClick=...) or fed to the shell as a quick way to get some work done without spawning new tools.