> The reason it feels like a kludge is that "comments" are normally understood to be non-impactful. Is a source transformation that removes all comments valid? If comments have no impact per the spec, yes. But that's not the case here.

This is not inlining in the compiler. It's a directive to a source transformation (refactoring) tool. So yes, this has no impact on the code. It will do things if you run `go fix` on your codebase, otherwise it won't.