This reminds me of the spongebob episode where krabs was in hospital and, because of money, was moved out before the vending machine, then to the parking place, and finally kicked down the hill. Back then it was funny but being reminded of it by the real world feels very much… not good.
We slowly need to interface with an app at work that uses fixed-width too. It does not sound that bad if you hear it but it sucks to figure out where you are missing whitespace when most fields are not used and therefore all whitespace. Oh, and of course there are a lot of fields, also are aligned/formatted differently based on their type and has thin/no/wrong documentation. And I have yet to find a simple but decent “debugger”.