I would normally respond that, as others have pointed out, you're basically saying you prefer to "hide" information that, to most people, is relevant (is this a keyword, a global or local variable, a type, a method, a static function...), but I've noticed that when I'm doing code review, using the shitty BitBucket interface which shows everything red or green, without any code highlighting, actually helps me a little bit to focus on the changeset as opposed to what the code is actually doing in general. This is helpful because the changeset is what I care about when doing a review (what's different than before is the first question, with understanding what code is actually doing comes second)... Later, I might need to look at the code in my IDE with proper highlighting to better understand what the changed code is actually doing in more detail, but that's rarely needed (unless it's comprehensive changes).

So, it occurred to me that whether syntax highlighting is actually useful depends somewhat on the context, what are you trying to do?!

I suppose it's easy to extend that realization to people who are different and might feel overloaded by information more easily, so I can sympathize with what you're saying (hope this doesn't sound condescending, I am just trying to say people can have very different cognition overload levels, regardless of how capable they actually are in general).