The compiler doesn't care about comments, so in my experience comments quickly go out of date as others change the code and ignore comments. There's nothing to

The compiler doesn't care about comments, so in my experience comments quickly go out of date as others change the code and ignore comments. There's nothing to say code can't be performant and legible. In fact I'm a bit confused what "clever" means here. Writing performant but illegible code does not take more cleverness than performant while legible.