I absolutely agree that intelligent highlighting or added emphasis to at least some part of the code is very worth investigating. I would argue it should probably be used more sparingly than colouring, but could be complementary. By combining the colours from the base and the contrast++ palette this would even be possible with Penumbra while maintaining the clean separation between colour properties.

In this area, as a novice coder, I am absolutely out of my depth though, so I’d have to defer to actual experts for the implementation.

Someone else brought up a similar point on comment emphasis but I’ve seen the opposing opinion too.