There may not be rules, but as in language as a whole, there are commonly shared and accepted conventions that can aid comprehensibility -- but only to the exte

There may not be rules, but as in language as a whole, there are commonly shared and accepted conventions that can aid comprehensibility -- but only to the extent that they are commonly shared and accepted. I've known some people who insist that punctuation is irrelevant, and they can understand written text perfectly well without it. And their reading speed does seem to be unaffected by the presence or absence of punctuation. But I generally find that while my reading speed is about the same as theirs for unpunctuated text, I read punctuated text faster than they do. Conventional punctuation helps those acquainted with the conventions to parse text. As they are just conventions, they will inevitably change over time. For example, it seems to be increasingly common to link two main clauses with a comma. Outside certain rhetorical and poetical usages, I find this jarring. But I may already be in a minority, and at some point in the not too distant future, it may not merit comment at all, except in the rantings of rules-fixated, traditionalist grammarians and would-be grammarians.