I honestly don't see how people can stand using 8 spaces (not to be confused with an 8 space tabstop).

Many people who put in 8 spaces (not a literal \t) have their editor do it for them. Either the editor autoindents, or they press the tab key and 8 spaces are put in.

As for using tabs rather than spaces, I despise that all to hell.

The orginal reason for a \t is that memory used to be much smaller, so using one character instead of four or eight made a big difference. With 500 GB hard drives, this is no longer an issue.

The modern reason for using a literal \t is that when it's done right, you can get it to look right with most reasonable editor/terminal settings. See one of my other posts in this thread for tricks to do this.