I think many programmers are not big on writing, you can see on this thread there are a large number that object to almost any comments at all, and support the assertion with the belief that comments go stale and won’t be updated because people can’t be bothered to write. I think the appeal of no comments is the quest for perfection in the source code - that you can achieve something that needs no explanation. In contrast literate programming nakedly admits the discovery of the solution and how code was developed and its imperfection.

That said it has caught on some with data science and actually is an option with swift playgrounds.

I like notebook-style programming (e.g. Jupyter, Mathematica, etc) for this. They don't quite fit the bill, and for example, don't provide a mechanism to render into a clean library with unit tests extracted from the notebook. But I still hold out hope for a good cross-language system.

Having read some of Knuth's literate code... good god that man is brilliant, but aesthetic language design isn't his wheelhouse