Comment by jiggawatts

Generally, high standards can only be achieved through enforcement, not merely through begging and pleading.

I like to add myself as a mandatory reviewer of all PRs and then reject changes that don't come with some explanatory comment or fail to update comments.

Even if huge swaths of the codebase are undocumented boring boilerplate, you still have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you get madness like ten pages of authentication and authorization spaghetti logic without a single descriptive comment.