Is this a case of academia being out of touch with working practices or has the favour of spaces changes in the last quarter of a century?

It probably just happened to be the personal preference of your two lecturers. An analysis of the top 400,000 GitHub repositories reported that spaces were more popular than tabs in all languages except C and golang ... with tab indentation dominating golang presumably due to the gofmt command mandating:

Gofmt formats Go programs. It uses tabs for indentation and blanks for alignment.