sqlfmt is inspired by the style of gofmt (https://blog.golang.org/go-fmt-your-code). The reason a tool having an opinion about formatting is useful is that it removes humans from having to care about formatting. I didn't like how gofmt formatted my Go code at first. But since I couldn't care, I didn't care, and now I never care about formatting. Without an opinion, we spend lots of time quibbling about stuff that doesn't matter.
Not having to argue about whether you want the shed to be blue or red really is super valuable.
One thing I learned somewhat recently as well is that within google3, these automatic formatters come in super handy when doing large-scale changes, e.g. when a library is deprecated and the maintainers are moving all the clients to the new one.
