I think I understand part of the problem. Many "literate programs" aren't literate in Knuth's sense. they are merely inversions of the conventional model. Where text is the default and code is the special case that has to be demarcated. Things like literate markdown I've seen which typically read like a regular program with extra text:

  # A Literate Program
  This is a literate program, the language is C. We'll
  begin with the includes because that's what C has at
  the start of every C file, and not because it makes
  any sense for the presentation:
  ```
  #include <stdio.h>
  ...
  ```

  Here are the declarations, you can ignore these for
  now.
  ```
  int main();
  double square(double x);
  ```

  Now that that's out of the way, ...

If that's all most people see then they haven't actually seen the benefit of LP. Where you can push that boilerplate stuff to an appendix so no one has to see it unless they're changing the libraries used by the system or some other thing that's important, but less essential to the understanding that LP tries to promote.