Literate programming, to me, feels like commenting on steroids. But that's not necessarily a good thing. A big philosophy right now, and one that I share, is that your goal should be to make code that can be easily understood without comments through expressive code.

Literate programming goes in the opposite direction, and I don't think that's necessarily good, though it has it's use cases. I think data science with Jupyter notebooks are a great display of when it's good (and that's likely the best / most used form of literate programming out there), because in data science a lot of what you need to justify is the "why" a calculation is done the way it's done. Pretty graphs inline are just a bonus.

For ordinary code though? Comments are a fallback for complicated bits, but I feel like they shouldn't be the norm. I want people to write code that doesn't need hand holding just to understand.