This is not a new insight and there have been a number of attempts to create programming systems where the programmer does not primarily interact with plain text but they have been largely unsuccessful. It would probably be worth exploring why they haven't taken off if one were trying to design another such system.
You can view sophisticated IDEs and refactoring tools as an attempt to improve the interface to plain text representations of code. These have actually had quite a bit of success.
Some approaches that move away from editing code as plain text have had success in particular domains. Visual Programming has shader graphs, Houdini, Unreal Blueprints, Substance Designer and other niches where it is relatively successful. Literate Programming has Jupiter notebooks and Mathematica that are popular in certain domains. Most of the success seems to come in particular niches, it's hard to think of widely adopted examples for "general" programming.
And Excel of course is a very successful non text based programming model within many domains.
