Unfortunately, the pep8 tool includes some additional invented rules of its own, mostly related to being far too strict about indentation of continuation lines.

PEP 8 is actually mostly silent on that topic, merely pointing out a couple of specific things *not* to do. It's the tool that extrapolates a whole host of continuation line indentation rules that even PEP 8 itself doesn't meet.

There's also no blanket requirement in the PEP to have spaces around all binary operators (since that doesn't always aid readability), just a limited subset of them.

I've recently filed a bug against the tool itself, suggesting that given its name, its default behaviour should be limited to things that are actually backed up by the PEP.

That said, I think some of the cases picked up here do represent genuine readability improvements due to improved alignment. They just need to be separated out from the spurious changes resulting from invented rules in the pep8 tool.