[virgilp]

Add "to most developers" for context and you'll probably get exactly what original claim meant.

It's not a non-statement. Rich Hickey explains it well, readability is not about the subjective factors, it's mostly about the objective ones (how many things are intertwined? the code that you can read & consider in isolation is readable. The code that behaves differently depending on global state, makes implicit assumptions about other parts of the system, etc - is unreadable/less readable - with readability decreasing with number of dependencies).

[Bjartr]

It can be further refined to

"to most developers who are most likely to interact with this code over its useful lifetime."

This means accounting for the audience. Something unfamiliar to the average random coder might be very familiar to anyone likely to touch a particular piece of code in a particular organization.