If a TODO passes code review, more than one person fucked up.

1. Those apps are simple
2. Those apps target a wide audience, hence have more budget as a result
3. Those apps are made by large, well oiled (you’d hope at least) companies. You don’t want my honest opinion on most small software development boxes. This industry grew faster than mentors became available for the newbies, so many devs including seniors still don’t know what they are doing.

Generally, you can replace some comments with variable names or comment names. Which means you must already be in the habbit of extracting methods, setting new variables to use appropriate names, and limit context to reduce the name (Smaller classes and methods means shorter names can be just as expressive, because the context is clearer). It lowers the number of wtfs per minute you get reading code before you even need whole sentences to explain why things are done in a certain way, because the names can be a powerful hint.

But realistically, you end up needing comments for some things anyways.

It has a rocky start, and a lot of cruft from that era sticked around.

There are also a lot of horrible legacy projects from the pre-ES5 era which are a pain to work with. Often older projects were coded either before people knew how to do javascript right, or before the devs who wrote it knew how to write javascript right.