An old paper on the expressiveness of the programming languages [1] had to add an implicit binary operator into whitespace to make Haskell not be ten times more expressive than most imperative languages.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2743686_Are_Ours_Re...

So, yes, it can be done and it was done. Yes, expressiveness rises. No, reading comprehension of such languages does not suffer. Yes, it has to have a lot of scaffolding.