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I have no problem with anyone jousting with the windmills; I have a problem when they don't realize they are windmills. Hundreds and probably thousands of programmers have taken a crack at this problem. That doesn't prove it's a bad idea but it is effective proof until shown otherwise that if it is a good idea it is not such a good idea that it can instantly catch up to the decades of work in text editing. And the way some people talk about it, it's clear that a lot of programmers think that it should be that good.

This is up there with "everything would be solved with visual programming" and "hey, what if we could put down different syntax on top of the ASTs?". If your mental model is that it must just be because nobody has put any effort into the question, update your model, because in fact tons of effort has been expended and I'd suggest anyone interested in adding to the pile and actually solving the problems (as opposed to playing about, anyone can play with anything they like) is best served by examining the large pile of previous efforts and figuring out what they will do better than before.

Creating a language designed for being manipulated this way is at least a bit more rare than just declaring structural editing is the way forward in a general sense. Still, I'm skeptical. The existence of a textual serialization of programming language concepts is not the problem, nor is the usage of said serialization. Every serious tool already immediately deserializes the text into an AST, and when you really get down to the nitty-gritty of how one represents these things in memory, it is not at all clear that there is necessary a "better" way to serialize these structures, or one that is really very different in the ways that matter. There's a number of well-known (by those who look) pitfalls built into the idea of structural editing and it is not clear at all that the fundamental disadvantages can be overcome. Maybe they can. But the evidence at this point is effectively proof it's going to take more than waving "structural editing!" and some excitement at the problem.