Programming is an exercise in manipulating semantic objects which is why stuff like blueprints in unreal engine are so easy to use. It will just get better and text will become an obsolete vestige, regardless of whatever idea you have of this being "harmful". I really don't think a character encoding with 30 ways to control the terminal (and now extended to encode emojis) is the be all end all way of writing and editing programs.

Consider that if text had an advantage, it would be that you could cut some string in half as some sort of manipulation that saves time. What do I cut in half? Change >= to = ? There's basically no advantage of text. I don't want half of an if statement, that's what text allows me to do, it's a pointless feature that makes inputting programs harder. The basic element on the screen should be the if statement itself.

There is no advantage to a 1D language. Text is a 1D language. If you have

  if (x) {
    if (y) {
    }
  }

You are just reading it as a 2D language, but it's not. It could be

  if (x) {
    if (y) {
    }}
  }

and mean something else. (Yes I'm sure you can catch this one, but not all in general). The only way to be sure is read it from start until end, which nobody does. This is a security issue too, which I discovered when I was 12 years old reading perl scripts from milworm. By formatting text you are already conceding that 2D is better.