I hate the "code should be self-explanatory so no comments" thing. I love comments. However, *how many* comments also depends on the language - in Elixir I write less because I feel it's expressive. I would write a ton of comments in C or a new language.
In my experience companies have proportionally the same amount of newcomers to code that open source does. Maintaining comments is part of the job. I believe that if you strike the right balance of comments, it's not hard to keep them relevant.
