Comment by Lutger

You don't have to store things in a database to do this. Code is almost almost read from disk into some kind of in memory data structure that is amenable to such analysis, maybe even more so than a generic database. Doesn't matter if you use vscode or vim, most developers have some kind of tool that does semantic analysis and which affords navigation and organization of code.

Its just that the main way code editors present navigation follows the path hierarchy, also because its often intimately tied to how programming languages shape modules. Most editors have at least some alternative navigation however, and most people are using at least some of them: outlining by declaration symbols, search, changes, unittests, open files, bookmarks, etc.

So in a way, this is already how it is done, except the 'database' part is really tied to the code editor and its storage component nicely decoupled (in the end, databases are usually also just a bunch of files).

I think any real improvements on this model can only come from a new programming language design, and as others have pointed out, this hasn't caught on in the past. The reason for this is probably not that file oriented modularity is the best thing there is, but rather the escape velocity needed to get out of the vast ecosystem of tooling around files, like the OS, git and existing code editors and whatnot.