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Context: I studied at Oxford

Fair point, I missed that when I skimmed OPs comment

We should really all just bow in awe as we are clearly inferior.

Princeton has a Code Reading 101 that all postdocs/professors must take, however in exchange for the Secrets of Speed Reading you must acknowledge every message with where you learnt those skills.

It's fast to read stuff when you have the domain knowledge. The weights won't be a 5kb Scala file: they'd probably be a big binary file, which is easy to search it github/locally after cloning.

Otherwise, if they are provided, someone in the thread will surely point to them.

class project, 200 students, 1500 LoC each. Time for grading.

there are contexts in which this may be well practiced.

imagine thinking you need to read every file in a project to understand the architecture and which pieces are important for specific functionality you're looking to understand. Have you ever picked up a bugfix ticket for some code you didn't write?