The indentation and all-caps are not modern, and the MACLISP primitive names like TERPRI are unchanged from the 60s. Otherwise, the coding and commenting style would not really raise any eyebrows today.
I first learned of literate programming from this culture instead of Knuth, e.g. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41983 ("The fourth section presents a completely annotated interpreter for AMORD").
I'm just saying yeah, expectations have definitely evolved, but it's not the case that PDP-10 hackers back then had not yet discovered or valued readability.
It's less fringe today, but I'm still not sure "code should be optimized for reading, not for writing" isn't still a fringe position, at least as evidenced by what people's actions say about their beliefs, rather than their words. Lip service of that is probably at least not fringe any more, which is progress of its own sort.
I'm not saying they were into literate programming, I'm saying it's misleading here to talk about what coding on the C64 was like.
8MB for an embedded controller is no great ask and you have to crawl a ways down the spec sheet pile to get a 33MHz processor nowadays. A top-end PDP-10 would today put it roughly on par with an Arduino [1], although the Arduino would be a bit short on RAM.
Even if you have the space to spare on comments and long variable names, you've been raised in a culture that considers those insanely expensive extravagances.
[1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare