Modularity incurs a complexity tax. If you are smart enough to keep it all in your head, like a Motie Engineer, you can simplify by omitting it. But if you're not...
Well said.
Hiding complexity is harder than handling it. Designing an effective way to expose it for use amounts to (part of) a "programming system" [Brooks].
So it's library writers who hide the complexity for average programmers, with a "programming product": stdlib, open source project or (rarer these days) commercial "engine".
When there is no such library, we get the current state of our art: many projects failing.
The point of literate programming is that you have a text which is structured in a way that humans are good at dealing with, which is not some nifty mathematical abstraction like functional or oop code nor coherent modules.
(Having worked with a badly structured monolith with a mixture of literal code and a million bad abstractions, I must admit the simplicity of working with the used-once literal code has its advantages. But so does the more abstract code. The only thing I know is that I want to control my entry point rather than go via a framework and suffer my concrete classes getting upcasted.)