I think something similar is going on with graph representations of otherwise linearly encoded texts, be that knowledge graphs, ontologies, or programming code. The idea that we spread out these more or less one-dimensional beasts into two dimensions, or even three, is deeply appealing to us, even though we haven't seen as much impact with the actual current results of this line of work. So thinks like UML diagrams, Vlojure, Scratch speak to our desire that they should be awesome. Just because it is a much better fit to our capabilities.

I would say it's the opposite. The fact that we take these multi-dimensional ideas, and reduce them to expressions in one dimension, causes a lot of unnecessary cognitive load to extract information from the text. We like when that goes away.

Oh yes, I am saying the encoding is linear, not the underlying idea. I think we agree on that.

To elaborate on what @Jason Morris says, when you flatten a multi-dimensional idea, some relation that has parts close together necessarily pushes them apart, so along that dimension, whatever it is, you'll have to jump around.