CWEB's approach of treating the tangled code as only intended for machine reading has the major drawback that you can't share the target source code with others and expect them to be able to read it; they need to buy into CWEB too.

There's not much of a trade off there. Either you use the tools that generated the code and edit their inputs, or the first time you update the code and rebuild your changes get clobbered.

And if people really find that literate programming makes the code that much harder to follow that they'd rather not use it, maybe it's not a great idea to use it.