The build approval process actually stripped out all comments via a script.

Thanks, Satan.

I'd watch the movie.

For my own amusement I'm going to pretend you were using something like Perl where determining what's a comment and what's code can be context sensitive.

i.e. stripping from # to the end of the line can be a very wrong thing to do in a language where the comment marker can actually be used in other niche ways.

Strip the wrong "comment" and your code won't compile. Or worse, do something unexpected.