I've never used literate programming in a large project, but I have used it a few times at work and my experience is mostly that you are right. In a team where

I've never used literate programming in a large project, but I have used it a few times at work and my experience is mostly that you are right. In a team where you'll have accumulated knowledge among team members about a codebase you are working in regularly, the benefit to literate programming seemed to be very quickly outstripped by the maintenance burden. There is an exception though: runbook automation. When I write scripts to automate work that comes up when I'm on call, I try to write them in a literate style when I can, and commit them to a runbooks repo. The extra documentation is a lot more beneficial because they tend to be things that people aren't looking at regularly, and someone might be looking at it because of a 3am page or some urgent outage, so having a lot of documentation up front can be a big benefit.