I'm guessing a lot of any perception of a lack of comments or documentation in a rust codebase comes down to how new or green a developer is to rust.

If you're just starting out or doing something relatively simple, your goal is to get something working. This is so true regardless of the language.

I've never looked at any Rust. But this mini thread leaves me expecting the Rust world to be like Perl. The experienced Rust/Perl user uses every feature and short cut for magnificently dense expressive (alt. incomprehensible gibberish to anyone else) and doesn't comment it because the code is self evident. When actually they just want to code wank showing how clever they are and how lazy anyone else is if they haven't take the time to understand the details and thus understand.

But like I said, I've not looked at any Rust despite its marketing success.

I've read a lot more Rust than I've written at this point... A lot of what I've seen has been really easy to reason with and follow. There are a few features that are a bit harder to grok, especially with complex access lifetimes. Generally those complexities have been more from the inexperienced as a lot of what I've seen from more experienced devs simplifies those complex points of interaction making the entirety more easy to reason with.

I find a lot of the complexities tend to come from devs with more experience in communities that tend to add complexity by nature (C# and Java devs in particular). YMMV of course, that's just been my take so far. I've written a few simple web (micro)services in Rust and a couple of playground Tauri apps. I will say the simpler tasks have been incredibly easy to work through.

Though I may not have always taken the absolutely most performant, least memory path of work, it's been smaller/faster than other platforms and languages I have more experience with. And that's without even getting into build/compile time optimization options.