Additionally, in no way am I advocating for no comments, that's obviously not possible (like your example). Comments are useful, even necessary, for code that might have an otherwise confusing logic to them.
I've seen plenty of code with documentation for a method with nothing more than:
/**
* Bills the user
*
* @param user The user to bill
*/
public void billUser(User user) {
//
}
I see this as someone trying to fool a linter that demands they have documentation. I think it's better to say "comment everything" because it puts documentation as a first-class consideration rather than an afterthought.
With regard to the sample, then if that is your experience, I cannot deny it, but, irritating as it may be, it seems fairly harmless. It appears to date from a time when it was thought that extremely prescriptive coding style standards was the way to fix programming - an even less realistic belief than the idea that code can be entirely self-documenting.
As for redundant comments explaining the obvious, that seems to be something of a straw man, at least in my experience - personally, I have very rarely seen such code. The person who is not motivated to write useful comments apparently prefers to write no comments rather than useless ones.