For your specific example, there would never be a “delay in milliseconds” variable in the first place. That’s just throat clearing.

“sleep 1” is the complete expression. Because sleep takes a parameter measured in seconds, it’s already understood.

You do not need “delay_in_seconds = 1” and then a separate “sleep delay_in_seconds”. That accomplishes nothing, you might as well add a comment like “//seconds” if you want some kind of clarity.

Years later, when all memory of intent is long gone, I'd much rather work on a large code base that errs on the side of too much "throat clearing" than one that errs on the side too little. `sleep 1` tells what was written, which may or may not match intent.

Many bugs come from writing something that does not match intent. For example, someone writes most of their code in another language where `sleep` takes milliseconds, they meant to check the docs when they wrote it in this language, but the alarm for the annual fire drill went off just as they were about to check. So it went in as `sleep 1000` in a branch of the code that only runs occasionally. Years later, did they really mean 16 minutes and 40 seconds, or did they mean 1 second?

Leaving clues about intent helps detect such issues in review and helps debug the problems that slip through review. Comments are better than nothing, but they are easier to ignore than variable names.