We have been building a live programming environment with a node based visual model for the last 6 years now. There are a few advantages which text based systems dont have, IMHO:
1. Reuse by bringing in visual blocks that are prebuilt.
2. Unified interface for multiple aspects such as for performance, debugging, inspection of state and live values along with programming.
3. Zoomability (we are not yet doing this) : Different tiles can have different levels of zoom, and that can make for a very interesting interface.
We have built a good number of production apps using our own platform, so the pros and cons of the approach are quite well understood by us. For things that are assembly oriented (composition by reusing work done by others, I think visual programming is quite elegant). For algorithmic thinking it would need to be augmented with other modes (in our system you can write new functions in any language that compiles to wasm, plus also write web components and bring them in).