Indeed, and the problem is that IDEs have encouraged developers to write convoluted code and to forget how to navigate a filesystem. Reading code and commit history is a much faster path to understanding a system than an IDE's autocomplete. I learned this from Ruby, and it serves me well in C, Kotlin, Scala, PL/SQL, Typescript, etc.

I would argue the exact opposite. Developers who force tools designed 30 years ago to dictate programming language best practices today are holding back the entire industry. There is no reason for my tooling to depend on my filesystem; imagine if my IDE integrated directly with vcs, and a language server provided both of those tools semantic information about my code, available on any device. Let's not kid ourselves either, utf-8 isn't human readable on disk, it's still a binary-like format.