I've worked with a lot of legacy code over the years. I don't usually care whether code has comments or not. Comments are a very poor way of expressing semantics in code.

Usually, I'm looking for general readability and understandability. I'd much rather see short, well-named classes and methods, well-named variables and good unit tests before I see a single comment.

In the absence of clean, readable code, comments are probably a reasonable but nevertheless inferior resort. I also agree that, sometimes, they 'why' of code is often best expressed as comments.