This. Documentation (comment blocks in code, as well as all other forms of documentation) tends to become outdated because it is not maintained in sync with every code change.

Solution: write clear, simple, modular code that is self-documenting and does not need extensive commenting.

How soon? I've rarely seen it happen in a meaningful way (i.e. other than someone using automated refactoring on some name, and breaking some comment reference that wasn't written in a way the autorefactor tool could read). When it happens and you see it, you should fix it like any other bug.

Key trick is writing comments as close as possible to the code they affect. Then it's hard to miss affected comments if one's not doing a shoddy job.

Overall liked the original post. But also liked what you said.

But here are a couple of Martin Fowler quotes (from his Refactoring book) I tend to follow:

“A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead.”

“Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/25215.Martin_Fowler

Reject pull requests that don't update the documentation (and tests).