Tell me you develop with modern languages without telling me you develop with modern languages.

You say this like it's a bad thing?

Try linting perl, or bash.

If you're already writing Perl/Bash scripts then it would probably not take you long to write a git hook to check the beginning of each line of source to check if there's a space or a tab character and preventing the commit if the wrong one is found. Crude and far from perfect, but still better than nothing.

if you work on a modern JS/Python/C# project, whatever, whitespace is going to be autoformatted, so the tabs vs spaces debate does not matter AT ALL.

It does though. If you read the original article then you'd know that the advantage of tabs is that everyone can choose exactly how deep their tabstops are, which is an objective benefit over spaces.