Turn Up the Signal, Wipe Out the Noise
Too many people working with code neglect the "I" in "IT". The tenets of Information Science hold true in our profession. Signal vs. noise is the name of the game.
Is it insignificant that a project like Sass provides us the option to eliminate "noisy" curly braces? I don't think so.
Even in crazy-gigantic open source codebases, there is the opportunity to turn up the signal.
There's a lot of noise out there, kiddos. Keep your ears open and your code focused and simple.