ˎa/bˎ is easier to read than $\frac{a}{b}$.
https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/img/preview-screenshot.p...
or fold-mode (shows unicode and abbreviations in place of commands)?
https://www.flannaghan.com/2013/01/11/tex-fold-mode
Changing the representation seems more sensible to me than changing the underlying file.
Also, while the a/b syntax is easier for easy cases, I shudder to think how a continued fraction might be type set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction
This seems to make easy things easier and harder things really hard.
Kinda like https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots or using org-mode for latex. Convenient for simple matters and something you have to fiddle with or work around when you want to do anything more advanced.
An odd thing I found, was the once I learned how to verbalize many of the maths that I encountered, reading them became much easier. LaTeX actually helped a lot here, because most of the constructs have good readable macros to typeset them.
Edit: actually even more to the point is the eqn sublanguage which really competes with Knuth notation.
He discuses these matters of syntax in his Gibbs lecture of of January 1978 (https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183544082): see Figure 3 on the top of page 344, where the notation of eqn is marked "Type B" (“developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories”) and the third column is "Type T".
I happen to have fond memories of using lots of TikZ to do lots of graphics, making full-color posters with it. It was only because I was too poor to buy InDesign.