Every time I read anything about Konrad Zuse, I find another thing to astonish me.

Paintings by Zuse...

https://www.wikiart.org/en/konrad-zuse

I sense a new pop culture computer icon, one who would have created a world similar to the steam punk fantasies, had his ideas been better financed.

I like the idea of an IDE distinguishing between scope types with colors, lines, or rectangles. Just this week I had to scroll up a few pages of C++ to check how deep a line is in scope. It would have been useful to see that the scope was: namespace, class, method, lambda block, for block, if block, if block.

Emacs has rainbow-delimiters and rainbow-blocks (and show-paren).

https://github.com/istib/rainbow-blocks

If this was done well, it could greatly increase both the readability and density of code, as viewed on screen.

I believe cognitive impedance mismatch major component of the hardness of programming as an activity.

That sounds like the code needs some refactoring. If only to clearly encapsulate individual steps.

Sure, you can do that if you want!

The scope lines could be implemented as an extension for pretty much any IDE.

IDEs arguably already do that, at least for the innermost scope the current line is part of, plus breadcrumbs for the surrounding scopes.