I once build an acceptance testing suite using literate programming. I had been handed a nice write-up by our resident physicist with all the maths for how thin

I once build an acceptance testing suite using literate programming. I had been handed a nice write-up by our resident physicist with all the maths for how things should work and I didn't want to lose that, so we cobbled something together that used latex math, had embedded test code, etc. These documents then served both as spec and as tests. IMO, this was a terrific use for literate programming. But we did not adopt literate programming as an overall approach, pretty much for the reasons you mention. If your end goal is to produce some kind of largely static artifact then literate programming is fine. For everyday code where you iterate and refactor all the time, literate techniques have all the downsides of prolific comments.