It is not clear if these implicit choices derive from the ignorance of alternatives or if they derive from developers' habits, reproducing what they are used to.
The OG literally invented editing text on computers, and since then many novels have been written on keyboards and computers. The "text" editors have fed back into the more basic code editors and we're in a mixed situation between "comfortable to edit code" and "comfortable to edit text".
I'd be interesting to explore more visual programming built into text editors, as an overview of code flow, because right now the best we have is the direct stack trace. In terms of code it would be great to have integrated tools that show a visual representation "map" of the functions usage and data flow.
As for regular prose, it would be interesting to see editors specializing in poems and other use cases. I know some editors specialize in novels by having wiki like features of linking characters to storyline and research work.
I'm not sure how much of those are used by real world authors though, I think they mostly are trying to get closer to the "typing machine" as possible, removing any kind of distraction to get the X words per day in.