Perhaps the better choice was to have automated tools to turn source code into understandable business diagrams to allow business analysts to partner with software engineers, instead of the other way around.
I don't know of any that can make it understandable, however. I think that would be a very difficult task, even for quite small, well-designed programs.
Code has a lot of relationships. In 2D it looks like a mess.
There's value in visual representations of complex things. See for example Edward Tufte. People probably just think of him as visualizing data, but his book Visual Explanations goes into many other areas.
My preference these days is to use a text-based representation to generate diagrams with tools like Structurizr DSL, WebSequenceDiagrams, PlantUML and Graphviz. The source for the diagram(s) can be kept in the repo with the executable code and versioned.
Maybe in another decade we'll get some tools that can take the executable source code, along with all the deployment descriptors, the Kubernetes charts, Terraform configuration files, shell scripts, and so on and generate meaningful visualizations.
