Python doesn’t really have scope in that way. Variables declared inside an if statement can be accessed outside of the if statement.

Control-flow blocks aren't scoped in most popular programming languages.

name one except python

Space is visible to me.

In the era that python was created in, autoformatters were not a thing and I appreciated the forced indentation. Nowadays with autoformatters being standard, the downsides of semantic white space is not worth it.

I don’t totally mind it. Poor PEP8 implementations can drive me nuts and so can the type of indentation allowed. But otherwise I can get over it.

And then there’s Bython... https://github.com/mathialo/bython

It makes scope visual and consistent. IMO it's less dumb than having scope defined by pairs of curly braces which are impossible to read without indentation and require extra effort to keep matched - unless you try to automate the matching with a good IDE.