As the engineering manager you should implement an automated code formatter in your CI checking. I think clang-format will do this for C. Doing this simply removes this whole class of conflict from your team.
This is a program that you run which will deterministically re-format your whole codebase. The CI checks on a PR should not pass until the PR diff matches what the formatting program says is the correct formatting.
This is a program that you run which will deterministically re-format your whole codebase. The CI checks on a PR should not pass until the PR diff matches what the formatting program says is the correct formatting.