their own preferences for tab width... ending up in an identation abomination

Can you give an example where a person's personal tab width breaks things? One tab per logical indent, and then spaces for alignment. How does this break anything? I know for a fact it doesn't or else people like me wouldn't advocate for it. What breaks indenting is mixing tabs and spaces for indents, and obviously that's foolish. You can't blame that mistake for causing an "abomination" when it's something that would violate any code style specification, whether using spaces or tabs. You yourself could set your IDE to emit only 2 spaces when you hit Tab, and that would also violate your code style spec if you mix those indents into a file with 4-space indents, and that has nothing to do with tabs at all.

Doing stupid things in the code that violates the code style are stupid things that violate the code style. No matter what whitespace you use. But having a personal setting to see 8 spaces per tab isn't one of them if you only use tabs for logical indenting and not for alignment.

All tabs or all spaces for indents result in the exact same thing: good looking code. But tabs then have further advantages. Easier outdenting, better accessibility, etc. The only benefit to forcing spaces is that some random program you use for code comparison or whatever might default to something other than 4 columns for a Tab and your code looks a little wide until you change your settings. That's nothing compared to the advantages of tabs. Turns out that "benefit" of spaces is actually a drawback because no one is allowed to view the indents as anything but whatever column width you personally think it should be.