I can't speak for anyone else but I never format for the front-end.  That, notwithstanding, there are a whole lot of places that require such formatting that don't involve any front-end and every one of them is one of the dozens of columns in hundreds of "Fixed Field Format" files that I used to have to generate.  I also don't use a front-end or Excel to generate my very nicely formatted "Morning Reports" for Overnight Job History, Enterprise Disk Report, or other reports.  I do all of the HTML formatting using some really simple stuff in T-SQL because I'd rather not use SSIS, SSRS, or most of the other SQL Server 4 letter words. 😉