> writing explanatory code comments in natural language is seen as unnecessary

It IS unnecessary. Having to write a wall of text to explain what your code is doing is one of the simplest code smells.

A little bit of very short comments is ok, but in general any verbose comment should always be for explaining the why, listing out some invariant, etc.

As a side note, another reason not to write comments about what the code is doing is because those comments then need to be updated too - and often they would not be leading to more confusion.