I would not at all be surprised if people who started off one way or the other (for generational reasons or indeed any 'whatever environment they were first introduced to' style reasons) are less likely to end up switching, but that probably says more about perceived switching costs as what would be most comfortable for somebody.
e.g. I know people who took a month to be comfortable without synhi but then loved that, and I've spent weeks trying to be more comfortable -with- and given up, and honestly anything that half screws your productivity for over a week is going to be a hard sell even if the end result -would- be better (waves in "also, still can't manage to drive emacs" ;)
It was hard for the first few hours, but then I eventually got used to it, and now I can't use anything else.
I know this is not quite as extreme as working without syntax highlighting :)
Ie, the paragraph (or block of code) your cursor is focused on is visible, the rest of the code is blurred out.
https://github.com/davidleghorn/atom-focus-mode
Edited to add that I found this for VS Code which I might try:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=imagio.v...
Although I can definitely imagine this being a plugin in different editors
It certainly sounds like an experiment that would be interesting to try, though.
If I could have some sort of focus follows mind where highlighting automatically happens commensurate to what level of granularity I'm currently thinking about the code at I would be extremely interested, but absent "focus follows mind" it's a trade-off that everybody has to make for themselves.
Some people prefer to highlight almost everything, some almost nothing, some people find it helpful for some languages/tasks but not for others.
It's similar IME to the extent to which preferred debugging styles (printf versus interactive versus hybrid versus situational choices) are also something people have to figure out, and, well, different people are different, and that's neither a bad thing nor an avoidable thing.