Admittedly I’ve been writing code in Python for many years now but, even from the start I never had a problem with the significance of whitespace.

Quite the opposite.

I like to format my code nicely anyways (or rather, mostly my editor does it for me because I’ve asked it to do so).

I indent with two spaces usually, regardless of language. And have my editors configured to insert two spaces when I press tab.

JavaScript, Rust, Python, C. Same difference, in terms of how I use whitespace.