It puzzles me too. I think that portability and the ability to use the same text-based tools even though you use different languages are the best reasons for sticking with text.
I think is a feeling of loss of control and having no clue what you're missing. Programs stored as unstructured text make it difficult to produce good tooling. Makes programmatic code gen hard, makes diffing hard, make automatically generating commit message impossible. Refactoring is always problematic. Merging even more so.
But it seems though even mentioning that perhaps structured data is a better way to store code makes most programmers really angry. At least that's my experience.
