I'm not OP, but my brain also quickly noped out of reading that page. I can appreciate the care that went into the formatting of commands and links, but it's a bit much to parse all at once. I think monospaced/preformatted text usually looks best with a different background (like the dedicated code blocks towards the end.) Also on my browser the preformatted text is decently larger than the normal paragraph text. This combined with the blue color is a bit jarring.

Choosing colors is like making music. This color scheme feels discordant, like a jumble of loud notes. Maybe try looking at color palette creators online?

IMO keep it simple applies here. The page linked below does pretty much everything your page does (minus code diffs) and is MUCH easier to read.

https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/getting-started#code

(not OP) some ideas: make the <pre>'s not go all the way to out the edge of the window. Make the diff colors and code colors less dramatically different from its surroundings. Increase the contrast of the default text. Use blue for links. Drop the orange

> are there any particular tweaks you think would work to reduce the impact?

Yeah, remove all CSS.

I clicked on View -> Page Style -> No Style in Firefox and suddenly I could read it. Reader mode in Safari also worked. Reading mode in Chrome didn't work properly.