I am not defending them. If a programmer makes the mistake of having any character in a monospace font be anything other than a multiple of the monospace character width.. sure revoke their programming licence. Straight back to kindergarten, have them make a turtle draw lines on a blank canvas for a couple years.

But that's not a very interesting discussion. If any editor I ever would write would have a fancy feature to mess with the sort of idiot that would use tabs for alignment, maybe I'd make tabs be off by a couple pixels. If it was intentional I would applaud them.