Start from the perspective of the user seeing effectively:

> error: expected the character ';' at this exact location

The user wonders, "if the parser is smart enough to tell me this, why do I need to add it at all?"

The answer to that question "it's annoying to write the code to handle this correctly" is thoroughly lazy and boring. "My parser generator requires the grammar to be LR(1)" is even lazier. Human language doesn't fit into restrictive definitions of syntax, why should language for machines?

> Because code is still read more than it is written it just doesn't seem correct to introduce ambiguity like this.

That's why meaningful whitespace is better than semicolons. It forces you to write the ambiguous cases as readable code.