I think "work to rule" is a large company's dream. "Things are moving slowly because our rockstar developers have to get their code reviewed!" "Excellent, I guess we'll need to hire a team to manage the code review process more closely." <1 year passes> "Wow Bob, the size of your org tripled. You are doing three times as much work, so please enjoy this new title and a yacht!"
That's if you only make it personnel-expensive. If your code is also blowing up computational requirements, it'll make it hardware-expensive too -- but as you note, even that might be a boon for somebody. If the crap performance impacts customers, or managers doing their jobs, then dissatisfaction will mount.
