Enabling more complex systems, making it much easier and faster to create safe, stable and efficient systems at current complexity levels - both are really the same goal. Making current complexity level easier to deal with also means you can increase complexity level to the point the work is as difficult as it was before. Your favorite cake suddenly costing half as much means you can save half the cost, or... just buy two.

> The skeptic in me thinks these are fancy bandaids for failure to keep complexity under control.

To me, most of the recent programming language trends are such fancy bandaids. You can't optimize for every possible concern simultaneously in a single plaintext format, but $deity, people try. That's how you get special syntax for Result<T, E> handling (e.g. ?, ?!), or increasingly impenetrable abstractions at the intersection of typing and monads - all because you'd like to represent error handling and logging and futures and few other things in maximally easy/readable way, in the same text, at the same time.

You're fighting two limits here - "in the same text" and "at the same time". IMHO, we should give up on both, and accept that the final "single source of truth" form will become some sort of unholy blend between C and Haskell, serving the role of assembly above assembly. Expressing everything in one place, but not casually readable. For day to day work, you would use many specialized representations, each focused on its specific concern, and free from constraints of a single common text format.

> The optimist in me thinks this sounds like a fabulously interesting development experience.

That's what I think too. It's about raising the tooling to meet us at the level we think at, making it work the way we think about code and systems - instead of trying to project every possible way of thinking into single programming syntax directly.

Note: there is prior art for this, mostly in Smalltalk world (including, recently, the Glamorous Toolkit). The short time I spent playing with those tools tells me this approach has great potential, but could use a lot larger dev community giving it prolonged focus, to improve and streamline the tooling.