[marcosdumay]

The is not the natural state of things. That's also not the original state of things.

For the decades that software engineering has existed, people have been busy migrating more and more information from offline in a different context into inline right at the code. Every single one of those times, people have experienced huge gains on the quality of the resulting comments, with moderate gains on project organization and productivity.

So, the reason comments are a greyed text inline with the code is that it has worked better. Having the comments offline (like software used to have) is very likely a flaw of those platforms. But well, the text-creation people never looked at improving their tooling anyway.

[amadeuspagel]

Different context meaning random chats and mailing lists, not an integrated system like Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

[marcosdumay]

Different contexts meaning integrated systems, official documentation repositories, parallel files included with the code, and well, almost everything you can think of.

People have not spent those decades doing nothing. They tried a huge diversity of stuff.