However, if someone claims to write self documenting code, and by that think it's enough to have long variable names and skip comments, then I can understand the sentiment above coming into existance.
In "identifiers are comments" paradigm the goal isn't only to just skip comments, but also to structure the code in a way so that it's as clear as possible what it does and why. This helps much more than a long comment block hidden somewhere in a big ball of spaghetti code.
Comments aren't a panacea either, as they take effort to write in a helpful way, often only occurs once (so you'd have to find the place where the purpose of x is defined) and of course, often are some level of wrong/outdated in relation to the purpose/function of the code.
Sometimes, it's not possible to write the code in a way that is clear, this could be for compatibility reasons or performance reasons. That is when comments really come into their light.