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Thanks for your response. I definitely agree that bikeshedding can be a problem in code reviews and bikeshedding itself is best avoided for sure. Automating that stuff away with linting tools is a good tool in the toolbox for that, and so to is having some conventions and/or understanding and accepting preferences of different team members and not actively engaging in bikeshedding over things that are a difference, but not a difference that makes a difference.

In my experience the value of code reviews doesn't come from nitpicking those types of things. That's by far the worst part of code reviews and is definitely annoying but mostly becomes not a problem if you employ the abovementioned tools/practices. Rather the value comes from others picking up mistakes in the quality of your implementation that arises from some gap in knowledge that the reviewer is able to pick up on and fill in. And to that end they're absolutely essential. They're not simply a box ticking exercise either - the amount of code reviews I've both done and received that picked up on actually important issues is in the high double digit percentages. I would take no code reviews to be a major red flag.



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