Also, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive.

I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.

I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.

I guess I may be an outlier here but I don't find any of those examples motivating at all. They make it harder for me to see the structure of the code at a glance.

Also I think it's a bit off the mark to think of it as being a wasted information channel. Redundancy is a feature of human languages, because our languages are not optimizing solely for density. A bit of redundancy helps our brains pattern match more consistently, almost like a form of forward error correction. Syntax highlighting is like that, at least for me, where it makes a big difference in seeing the structure at a glance, and more overly complex coloring rules thwart that for me. Like I don't want to be trying to match up rainbow shades of parens.