Yes, the greatest value add of comments for me is the potential time-saving, in the ideal case (re)acquainting you with a large work of code by guiding your attention from the top-down - firstly to orient you in the broad structural aspects, then to fly you smoothly down towards the minutae of reading individual lines of code.
This does sometimes entail a few 'what'-style comments, so I'm disappointed to regularly read of programmers that have apparently taken up arms against them.
No, I understand that part; but, I think of a "what" comment as "incrementing value of X"
a "wat" comment, like the meme, is more of a "this is a really weird blob of code that might be obvious when you break the whole thing apart; but, what it's doing is _this_ this is the implementation of it because we have a complicated data structure that's connecting all these pieces"
This does sometimes entail a few 'what'-style comments, so I'm disappointed to regularly read of programmers that have apparently taken up arms against them.