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And now imagine maintaining the code of PBR, and with more than 5 people working on it at the same time. Literate programming is great for reading, although I prefer having "real code" (which can normally be extracted, that's not a problem) to read too.

Btw. there is a newer - 2023 - edition available now: https://www.pbr-book.org/4ed/contents

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I'm not saying it is for everyone, or for every project. My point was that "Literate programming only works for small scripts and narrative documentation" is far too wide-sweeping of a statement. There are plenty of non-trivial examples of its use, and it obviously "works" for some people.

It certainly does, but these "some" really are exceptions. Just try it for yourself, edit PBR and compare the experience to "just" editing the source code of PBR (yes, of course, not being used to something doesn't help). To be honest, I haven't looked at PBR for more than a decade so maybe I would succeed nowadays, but I doubt that.

I guess realising that literate programming is literally [sorry] writing a programming book should be enough of an argument to know that it isn't suitable for most people. And no, a white-paper is not a "programming book" suitable for most people to read ;)

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