The fact the code comments aren't meant for public consumption, and figures are, is completely irrelevant to the analogy. The point is that lots of things we do could be done better, but having an outsider focus on one of them, and tell you you could be doing it better, is not super-helpful. It's like being told by three people that you need to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
That said, and having looked at the article more carefully (ahem), most of the concrete suggestions they offer are sound, and are things that I think are pretty well-known, at least to the practicing scientists I talk to. "Pie charts are bad", and "Beware of false color images, especially ones that use the 'jet' colormap." are both (parapharases of) statements that I hear from working scientists.
But then there's this:
"And yet few scientists take the same amount of care with visuals as they do with generating data or writing about it. The graphs and diagrams that accompany most scientific publications tend to be the last things researchers do, says data visualization scientist Seán O’Donoghue. “Visualization is seen as really just kind of an icing on the cake.”"
This bears zero resemblance to my experience. Most scientists of my acquaintance make the figures first, and then write the text. And certainly I'd say that more care is taken with the figures than the text.
I guess I just feel like I see a certain amount of fetishization of beautiful scientific illustrations (Tufte, etc), out of all proportion to its actual importance to the scientific endeavor. The readers of most scientific articles are probably not going to be flummoxed by a pie chart. And of course, time spent focusing on this kind of stuff is time that might very well be better spent doing experiments.