I have heard these arguments many times. The problem is that code is not good at expressing intent. Intent is something that often takes a sentence or two - should we use 100-character long method names?

There is also the assumption that everyone writes beautiful code. That is hardly the case; so if the advice is that someone should not comment, but instead write beautiful code, the outcome will be lots of uncommented bad code.

I feel I write clean code - I have been coding since the early 1970s and have built compilers and lots of sophisticated things, not to mention authored an 800 page book on software architecture, but I often find that when I revisit code that I wrote a year before, I am very thankful for the comments.