It's not absurd if you think about the lifetime of software. It is created once and used immediately, but reread, adapted and tinkered with for decades after that if it is useful.

The number of reads is FAR greater than the number of writes for any given piece of code, and it needs to be comprehensible if it is to be extensible.

So in fact that instruction applies to all software, and I wish more people would take it seriously. It also applies in the AI era, because the AI has to understand the code too, and AI's spend more time reading code than writing it, indeed they base what they write more on what they read than humans do.