I remember having a chat with Andrew Gerrand at some Go conference, about how syntax highlighting is mostly done wrong, we just got used to it being that way. It's not like we colour words in a sentence based on their type, but we do enjoy tools highlighting misspelled words or grammatical errors.
In my experience syntax highlighting as a tool mostly help with certain classes of errors (e.g unclosed string or comment), not visually tokenising text for me to understand.
I've seen some such uncoloured theme (nofrils) that would de-emphasise either comments or code, and you could toggle between the two states, which I found quite useful in nicely commented files:
https://robertmeta.com/posts/syntax-highlighting-off/
There are a bunch of learnings and a couple of links to references in that article. Ironically one of the most prevalent I experienced was this one, which I found very odd because picking a colorscheme for my $EDITOR is quite literally a choice that would affect only myself:
> People on the internet will get very angry at you if you tell them you don’t like syntax highlighting. VERY ANGRY.
Some of these vim "color"schemes:
https://github.com/robertmeta/nofrils
https://github.com/clinstid/eink.vim
https://github.com/ikaros/smpl-vim
They pair well with vim-airline's "raven" theme.