Unless I say it's meaning is to be optionally reflected upon during runtime!
Look, I understand the purism and mostly, I agree. But this is not a clean slate language, it will never be perfect and it's going to become more and more idiosyncratic as times go by.
Comments are a kind of freedom in code. You're completely free to use them precisely because (in a plain execution environment) they cannot influence the result of evaluation
If comments /can/ change the result of evaluation then you simply are not (completely) free to use them. (And yes I know that this is a simplification in JS where you can already get the source code of a function with toString... Ugh)
Also, comments are syntax and they're mostly meaningless. By your reasoning, programming languages should have no comments.
So, it's not really a qualitative issue (presence of meaningless syntax) but a quantitative one (presence of lots of parsing complexity).