> Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.

To me it's even less problematic than this. Not being able to remember important codes except via muscle memory is quite unsettling for me because every now and again my muscle memory fails. Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".

With syntax highlighting, even if my muscle memory fails me I still benefit from syntax highlighting (I think). Because I can immediately see the structure of each line. If I am looking through code for a particular thing, I will probably be able to disregard entire lines because they obviously don't have the structure I am looking for. And even within a line, I can just look at the beginning of each "span", immediately know if it's what I'm looking for, and skip to the next span if it's not.