I directly manage one team, and oversee another, both use gerrit (the code review from Google, used on Android).

I 100% agree that the shorter the changes, the better the reviews.

I am 100% sold on code reviews, because of:

1. the number of bugs found before they were pushed,

2. everyone writes code for other people now, whereas before we wrote the code for ourselves, and

3. improvement to APIs before they hit the code base and documentation.

Every single one of these things was a surprise to me, and I've been doing this a very long time. I never would have believed how happy I would be with the result.

Regarding other comments on annoying, small comments on style, etc: this is a problem with your people and your team leader. If this happened with my people, I'd have a conversation offline with them and tell this to not use code reviews in this petty way (to push their own styles). One thing it made me realize, every organization needs a style guide, but you need to make sure it doesn't go too far. Give people some latitude, just put the important stuff in it.