The main problem is reformatting code that intentionally deviates from the formal rules for the sake of nicer look.

You can turn it off for some selected code blocks, e.g. it looks like this for Spotless (Java):

// spotless:off
String content = Joiner.on(System.lineSeparator()).join(
    "services:", 
    "- name: name", 
    "  image: artifacts-dev/image"
);
// spotless:on

And there's a similar feature in clang-format as well.

That's exactly what I'd like to avoid. In order to let code look nicer, we'll make it uglier by adding meaningless comments whose only purpose is to satisfy automatic formatters.

That said, I can accept a compromise set of formatting rules that almost never have exceptions.

Maybe we could start with a linter like clang-tidy and see how it goes? It would not be able to touch the code, just inspect and complain, and we could configure the rules

IncludeCategories seems to refer OpenJDK sources - not relevant for async-profiler.

removed and clarified that this is a .clang-format file.