This functionality is super achievable in Emacs. With org-babel + org-roam, one can do literate programming inside a fully-indexed knowledge management system, with all of the advantages of an IDE to boot. There’s even a very cool paper about this concept in the context of education and research. It doesn’t touch on a full PKM but otherwise goes pretty in-depth about why this is desirable and achievable.
Now, this is certainly not “a first choice for non-programmers” and Logseq is much friendlier to the average end user, but with something like Doom Emacs it does not take a significant amount of effort to get going.
Dendron is definitely a good source to pull from for ideas, but my impression was that it made it far too easy to impose far too much hierarchy. Personally, when I use a system like Logseq, I want storage and retrieval to be largely the same action, friction-less and organic
I used org-roam for a while before logseq. I don’t manage very much code in my day-to-day, but on the occasions that I did, this functionality was extremely useful, especially since my coding knowledge and skills are limited. I did not have to be confused when coming back to things I hadn’t touched in a while, since I had prose-level editing for my personal documentation.