The problem is there's not just one type of code. Shared low-level code needs much more comments as shuffling a bunch of words through memory often is a bit abs

The problem is there's not just one type of code. Shared low-level code needs much more comments as shuffling a bunch of words through memory often is a bit abstract and you don't get the "why" by just looking at it, while writing business code that basically glues the UI to the DB using a lot of frameworks for the ugly parts can (and should) read like English. I would suggest to use commenting as soon as you're doing something that's not immediately obvious to the reader, which can be all of the time or almost never depending on what you're doing. If would like to see some examples of Rails or JS code that needs comments according to you to have a better discussion about it.