> I was probably not alive the last time anyone would have learned that you should read existing code in some kind of linear order, let alone programming.

If you want to dive all the way down that rabbit hole, can I recommend you check out the wikipedia article for the book Literate Programming [1] by Donald Kunth [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth