I'm more than half convinced that the comments shouldn't be in the code itself but attached as metadata to the commit that introduced the code in question, with

I'm more than half convinced that the comments shouldn't be in the code itself but attached as metadata to the commit that introduced the code in question, with the further implication that every commit should be focused around a single idea that lends itself to a single coherent narrative. The big drawback (right now?) is that diffs are computed on a line basis rather than a semantic token basis, so a bug fix for a comparison operator obfuscates the raison d'être of a whole conditional.