This is required for Auto Format compatibility because it has the undesirable effect of indenting only unindented contents of multi-lline comments, thus altering the relative indentation of the text.
The exception is the Max/MSP patches as I did not know whether indentation would break them.
Tools > Auto Format in the Arduino IDE removes asterisks from the start of every line in a C style comment, causing that character to be unsuitable for use as a bullet for lists in the example comments.