I'm pretty sure that if I were to start contributing to that codebase I'd be really happy that those comments where there. However I'm also pretty sure that as I learned the code I'd be less happy about them and prefer to be able to see more of a function on a single screen. So maybe n00b-hood applies to code bases too.

I also think that some of those functions are too large even without their comments, exec_simple_query is gigantic.