I get the why, kind of - if you need colors to make sense of code, maybe the code isn't clear enough. If you send blobs of code through email and other systems that don't necessarily have syntax highlighting, it also makes sense. But on a website, whyever not?
Personally I can't say when I was last actually aware of syntax highlighting. The only time I'm actively engaged with it is to change the default low contrast comment color that a lot of themes have (for some reason, as if comments are unimportant / noise) to something better. For Go, I don't really notice when it has or doesn't have syntax highlighting, at least not on e.g. go's website.