Whitespace is useful in normal prose because it has no inherent visual structure aside from punctuation. A programing language is inherently structured into logical functions and blocks. If your function is so complex that you need to start adding whitespace to make it visually parseable then that's its own problem.
The function is pretty short - 40 lines including comments. Despite how short the function is, it still uses whitespace to separate and group adjacent lines of code. Personally, I find the code more readable like this. Indentation makes syntactic blocks obvious (the while loop and if statement). But there are also conceptual groupings between lines that mean nothing to the compiler, but are semantically meaningful to humans. I can tell at a glance that the comment about safety is most associated with that one line below the comment. And so on.
I think this code would be worse if we deleted the whitespace. How would you improve this code?
Maybe for you. But it would reduce the readability for me.
At a minimum, the blank lines implicitly scope the comments that sit above connected code blocks. Those comments - especially the comment about safety - would be harder to understand and audit without its context being so clear.
And again, can you name any benefit to removing all the blank lines? If we can both read the code easily with some empty lines to space it out, that seems like the best option.
