It's more that the language spec does; if statements, along with a number of other things, desugar to case which is the fundamental conditional construct.

(And more personally, I find the indentation behavior annoying, in that I need to indent then and else more inside something that uses layout; plus the lack of an else if that is aware of being part of a compound means that it "ladders" even more, so I end up switching to case just to keep from ending up on column 200 or something.)