I agree with you, tye
tab is a key which behavior apes a mechanical device. It should generate the appropriate number of spaces. It should not have been a character in the first place because its interpretation vary with editors. Consideration of disk space or bandwidth are more and more irrelevant partly due to the existence of good compression schemes.

Hopefully, emacs has a untabify function that converts tabs to spaces and the buffer local variable indent-tabs-mode must be set to generate spaces on tab press.

-- stefp