[fiddlerwoaroof]

> note that nothing stops you from ignoring the filesystem when navigating relationships. Nothing stops your IDE from indexing the data. Even ctags is decades old

Sure, but all these systems do significantly more work than necessary (or have subtle caching issues and race conditions) because they have to be continuously reindexing an anemic model of the code base.

As far as image-based systems go, give me one of those any day: Common Lisp and Smalltalk have tooling and introspection capabilities from the future. My own experience is that I’m significantly more productive getting up to speed on a new Lisp (Common Lisp, elisp, Clojure) codebase than on any of the alternatives because the system stores so much metadata about the entities.

Also, I think you're underestimating the capabilities for forming narratives that my proposed system gives you: views, stored procedures, various tools built on things like graphviz for visualizing the structure of the code.