I often work with code bases developed in academic circles. I.e. written by non-c.s. students. Of course they are not experienced programmers, how can they be, it's often their first real software work. There is no professional code review, the code is sometimes beyond ugly, fragile. Bugs get fixed by the next generation... I just ignore all comments. Again, it's not their fault, it is a given just from the situation. But in this situation, it's much better to teach them to write readable code first. And not to trust any comment already in the code.

All people who write bad code write bad comments = / = All people who write good code write good comments/don't need them.

Well, the point is that people who write good, clean code don't need to comment their code extensively. They don't need to continuously explain why they did some horrible hack or some trivialities because their code is well structured and very easy to understand based on other good software development practices. They don't write the requirements of their functions as code comments, rather they write unit tests that document the requirements etc.

I think this ignores the idea that code also has context to it, and that comments even in elegant code are useful not for documenting how a bit of code works, but why that particular thing was done.

Yeah, «why you need comments? just read the code» (c) Brainfuck developers.