[Tiberium]

Honestly it's a bit of a shame. I checked and they could've shortened their base64 payload by 304 chars by removing all comments except the top two congratulatory ones, or by 524 if they removed those too.

[OtherShrezzing]

Would they still get the highlighted "PEACE FOR ALL" text throughout the shortened string? It looks like the length, and presence of those characters, was an explicit design choice.

[lemagedurage]

Maybe they added the comments to get a longer payload for the sake of the shirt's design.

The comments can be more cute/awe inspiring for people who aren't as familiar with bash but like solving puzzles as well.

[yborg]

The HN optimizing T-shirt compiler is the next stage here :D

[saidnooneever]

im just sad it didnt render a qr code leading to malware :'). the different ways ppl look at obfuscated codes and scripts hah