Why is it that when people are anal about linting they don't like the default/mainstream conventions?

Experience

Individuality. Who else is indenting 3 spaces?

Narcism.

"only my opinion matters, compromise is suicide".

well isn't that what linting is about? what's the point of linting if you're not gonna standardize

Some people use a linter to partially compensate for not having an actual type system. Others are using it to conform to some arbitrary standard. Different reasons lead to different choice of rules.

Almost all standard linter rule sets contain some absurd naming rules that hurt your code quality if followed. So normally you can't just use the default set. You have to change it, because Microsoft thinks, that methods have to start with a capital letter or the inventor of Python really dislikes camel case. And then there are the C lovers who insist on a new line before opening a brace...

Don't care which convention is chosen (tabs, spaces, style rules) but care about one being chosen, mainly to avoid git diff clutter.

gitk (standard git branch viewer) shows tabs as like 10 spaces, so hard to read when mixed with spaces. But a surprising amt of devs I met never do git diffs or don't give a shit.

Dislike opinionated rules like "prefer object destructuring over Object.assign"