Therefore when we jumped both feet into Clojure we unconsciously brought with us the belief that comments just weren’t needed
I used to be in the "code tells a story, no comments needed" camp. In large part because two of my three university courses had automatic marking system which detracted points if comments exceeded a certain percentage of text mass. Habits!
Gradually I've been finding myself commenting more and more in my code. In FP (mostly F#) code I almost always end up with some incredibly information dense set of lines that needs at least some defense of its existence.
Having spent some recent weekends reading the sources of id-software games[1] I've started to really think about the approach to comments in imperative code too. I've started commenting lots and then cutting it down later. If anything, it helps me reason about my code better.
On a totally separate tangent, I feel like the kernel of most of my FP code for data processing is essentially array programming like APL / J, just way way way more verbose.