This is true and reasonable for small systems and code bases, and small teams. But it’s not generally a good idea to argue for a relaxed balance in large system

This is true and reasonable for small systems and code bases, and small teams. But it’s not generally a good idea to argue for a relaxed balance in large systems or code bases, nor with large teams, where you can travel all around the codebase via roads you built and mapped, or you can travel all around the codebase following bugs into code you don’t know caused by lack of isolation. Eventually, if you don’t isolate, then there’s no avoiding traveling all around the codebase, it’s just whether you want that to be a pleasant journey or not. Of course it’s really hard to argue over programming platitudes without any specifics in front of us to discuss, but chances are high that experience over time with large systems on large teams will make you reflexively avoid arguing for balance when it comes to either comment verbosity or code isolation.