I think this example reveals a problem with attempts at literate programming in general, including something responsible for many of the things that Kartik brings up in his critique.
The only way to do literate programming is top-down. According to Kesteloot, the only decent way to do any programming is top-down, and bottom-up straight up doesn't work. I think he's wrong on the latter point (for reasons intrinsic to what follows), but not because I disagree with him about top-down design being superior.
The reason why literate programming hasn't caught on is because programmers aren't sufficiently interested in escaping their mind shackles. Too many of the programmers who are exploring the space, including Knuth, are bottom-up programmers and they either refuse or are unable to escape the trap of doing things in a bottom-up way, which actively works against literate programming.
In the kilo example, in fairness, they've taken somebody else's code and tried to turn it into a literate program, so (AFAIUI) the final result matches antirez's original published source for kilo.
Go in and replace the main implementation with a proper top-down rendition, progressively filling in the functions that are called, and then ask a programmer who is a fan of the idea of literate programming and agrees with Kartik's points what's wrong with it. Their reason almost certainly is going to hinge on efficiency. But that's the rub! They're subconsciously, even while acknowledging the shortcomings of the Knuthian approach, still themselves making arbitrary decisions to satisfy the compiler, not for the sake of readability! In fact, in this case, they're actively working against readability.
Literate programs, with few exceptions, have to be designed and written top-down, even at the function/method level.