Amen on syntax highlighting. We collectively have wasted a staggering amount of tine on this finnicky anti-feature. Personally I used it for at least a decade until I finally realized it was 98% distraction. When you think about it, it becomes obvious that almost all code you are reading must be syntactically correct, unless you've recently edited it. If the language needs syntax highlighting to be legible, that is a language issue. My theory for why it is so popular is that it can be low hanging fruit for validating code that is faster than the full compiler. But even in that case, I only want syntax errors to be highlighted. To me, syntax highlighting of correct code is simply unnecessary noise.

That being said, if you genuinely believe syntax highlighting makes you more productive, I won't argue with you. I just think it's unfortunate it's been made the default in most cases.