I’ve often spent more of my time reviewing code than writing code off and on for decades as my role and team size changes. So, none of this is new to me except that the loops are much tighter and I don’t have to debate the social cost of pointing out what is workable but not acceptable after the 4th review cycle when I suddenly notice something new in code that had been there all along.

The truth is a lot of developers are terrible at reviewing design specifications and code. They rarely - if ever - find any real correctness issues and more than half believe it’s mostly a status / dominance game. Many can’t force themselves to deeply think about the code if they aren’t writing it.