About a decade back Bret Victor [1] talked about how his principle in life is to reduce the delay in feedback, and having faster iteration cycles not just helps in doing things (coding) better but also contributes to new creative insights. He had a bunch of examples built to showcase alternative ways of coding, which is very close to being HUDs - one example shown in the OP is very similar to the one he presents to "step through time to figure out the working of the code".

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Fascinating to imagine each node being analogous to a transistor and carrying out a “basic compute”, to make up a big computer. A new abstraction layer calls out for us.

I was hoping it would speak to the second part more - why is it worth it?

I get the arguments in the abstract sense, you want the tool to be background, maximum focus spent in flow. But in my experience I’m rarely chugging out multiple WPM constant typing. This is as a software engineer coding on Python predominantly. Plus the advent of CoPilots along with autocomplete IDEs I am not even typing as much as before. Granted, I am spending less time looking at the keyboard because I have the key sequences imprinted in my head now, and that feels nice.

The blocker in flow is rarely the time I spend pecking out keys. So what am I missing, how much is it truly worth it?

This is lovely. I maintain a dev log at work where I manually time-stamp entries section wise, but many times I’m doing it after the fact. Ability to edit the time stamps and then search based on it would make this super powered.

Actually, I would love to combine this with Heynote[0], have you considered it?

[0]: https://heynote.com/