But that is the point of the article. Literate programming was built on the premise "what if you could have _one_ document that you could either typeset as an a

But that is the point of the article. Literate programming was built on the premise "what if you could have _one_ document that you could either typeset as an article/report _or_ compile as a program?", but then most implementations only cater to the second part of the equation and essentially default to "comments on steroids". Being able to expose pieces of code in a non-linear way would be a basic necessity, so that you can put the "interesting stuff" front and center and only focus on the minutiae (e.g., the #includes) later in the exposition.