I honestly don't understand this. The syntax is one of the most boring parts of a programming language. It is solved by the IDE (and now LLMs). I don't care about syntax, I care about what I can build. Since the beginning of time people argue about things like tabs vs. spaces, or the dollar sign and I honestly don't understand why that is. It just doesn't matter.
Just to be clear: consistency does very much matter. The mental load of reading totally different styles of code is awful and a waste of energy.
Readability (and hence, maintainability) is definitely a factor in decisions like this. In the particular case of the pipe operator though, the article does mention something it lets you do that you couldn't do before: in a context where only an expression is allowed (such as match), you can now do things that previously would not have worked because it would have required temporary variables.
Just to be clear: consistency does very much matter. The mental load of reading totally different styles of code is awful and a waste of energy.