Did you have a typo or was that intentional? You wrote "end up leaning towards spaces" for both. I'm not even sure which you meant to be tabs. I grew up post-GUI, but now use mostly the terminal. My preference is only spaces.

Purely a guess, but I think that spaces vs tabs is a proxy indicator of some psychological difference. Perhaps it is conscientiousness. On some editors, you have to go out of your way to change tabs to spaces. If you're very picky about how your code looks and want it to always look the same in every editor and to everyone, then maybe you use spaces. Personally, I do ascii diagrams and even arrows inside of comments to point to different variables and make comments on active code. I am very very picky about how my code looks. I know code aesthetics isn't a be all end all, but maybe it could be some psychological tendency like this. Also, I'm not a paragon of big bucks or awesome, revolutionary code. Over time, perhaps conscientiousness or fastidiousness keeps you employed or people give you more responsibility and money.

Should one of those "towards spaces" have been "towards tabs"?

If that's true it could explain the pay gap. By replacing pay gap with experience gap. Which makes sense that there would be a difference in pay.

Presumably the second one was supposed to say "leaning towards tabs".

I think you're onto something. In old-school editors there wasn't an abstraction layer between the characters and the way they were displayed. You were moving bytes themselves, so a character byte that took up multiple columns but which you couldn't edit the middle of must have seemed gross and unnecessary.

In today's world there's more abstraction, so people are more comfortable with abstraction. I use a font that merges "=>" into a single two-column-wide arrow, because it's more pleasant to read. I don't take offense at the fact that what's on my screen is slightly removed from what's literally on disc, because today you get more benefits from having that separation.