I agree completely; I just think on a gut-level a solution would be validated with use despite the small marginal gain over text in complexity of tooling. Among RAGs, TreeSitter, and the success of LSPs, I think there's room here to synthesize some improvements.
While we're on the topic, if we store only syntactically valid programs, we can express diffs in terms of semantic refactoring rather than textual changes. This would enable stuff like preserving refactoring across merges, thereby bypassing conflicts that would arise under text merges. There are limits to this of course as you can still come up with conflicts, but anything to ameliorate the nightmare of manually fixing a textural merge.
Huh, your comment made me reconsider. Variable names are very important to code quality, so how would those be preserved if not using text? I suppose they could be programmatically generated to be "good" but I foresee illegible edge cases being frequent in that case.
While we're on the topic, if we store only syntactically valid programs, we can express diffs in terms of semantic refactoring rather than textual changes. This would enable stuff like preserving refactoring across merges, thereby bypassing conflicts that would arise under text merges. There are limits to this of course as you can still come up with conflicts, but anything to ameliorate the nightmare of manually fixing a textural merge.