One of the problems with code reviews is they're often done really poorly, for a number of reasons:

1. Reviewers are often poorly trained to provide good design reviews and default to nit-picky stuff a code linter should pickup. Human linting is just a poor use of time and money.

2. Nobody seems to ever have time for them to deep dive into the code.

3. Few engineers seem to ever actually want to do them.

4. Reviews can become hostile.

Code reviews are probably really important in some fields, for example, medical equipment, aviation, etc, but for the vast number of projects where we're shoveling A bits to B bucket or transforming C bits into D bits it's overkill and companies would be better off investing the massive amount of wasted time in better CI/CD infrastructure.

> Would you be a better engineer today if you had regularly participated in code reviews? Would your coworkers?

Maybe, but probably not. It's not like I never see someone's code, it's right there when I'm working in the same code base and I can go through commits to see the high-level changes.

There are lots of ways to become a better engineer and code reviews are pretty far down on the list in my view. They usually just turn into tedious ordeals that burn up actual productive time.

I believe s/he would, and likely knows it. They just said it was overrated, not useless. They just draw the tradeoff line differently.