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Tim Severien writes about how to use inline guides to navigate other developers through a codebase. This is motivated by having to on-board other engineer to a system, and not with the idea of code as an educational tool & object of study per se, but nonetheless I think it would also be a good mechanism to carve out an learning path through a given codebase.

There is one drawback though: this lives very close to the code, so it must come as an addition to the codebase. I assume most maintainers don't have the drive to bend over backwards to optimize their codebases as object of study and don't want such kind of permanent residue, such a guide would best live in a fork or seperate branch of a given repository. But it might be a mechanism worth exploring for that matter. Also an example of how greppability is an underrated code metric.