elastic tabstops of course doesn’t use an explicit bar character either
i chose to add it in the demo
let’s say you try to remove a tabstop, how would you do it?
you’d have to position the cursor to the right of it
the cursor only occupies a space between characters, as does an indent guide
(oops, I now see the last example above—it places indent guides in their own character column, making them easier to edit)