If it doesn't do anything - if it doesn't matter, then why care?
I mean this quite literally. Is it worth expending any time or energy on changing habits and tooling when it doesn't matter, and will probably never matter?
> If it doesn't do anything - if it doesn't matter, then why care?
Because it's confusing.
I've been doing this a long time and didn't actually know that /> is meaningless, and it would explain some
random bugs I've worked around in the past.
I've seen people "fix" stuff by adding a "/>" as that's "better".
Other than that, I don't really care because as you mentioned it doesn't really matter. But the needless churn is a bit annoying at times, so not a bad thing to get the message out that it's a XHTML thing and doesn't matter in HTML.
It's like putting Javascript code in HTML comments - it's totally not necessary, but some people still do it.