But last time there were two "seniors", each with different conflicting preferences and each insisting that your code is "bad" and "mess". (And inexperienced project manager buying their bs because they were confident). And it changed based on what blogs they read last week. Juniors were more fine with that then me, because they tended to belive seniors know what they are doing. Plus juniors worked only on one module and I did on two, so I could see how what one called crap on the meeting is demanded by the other.
And the rules were different for different people.
I think it is the ability of coder to tell "fuck off" on changes he disagree with that makes all the difference. I was comiting code I disagreed with and had to come Sunday to make changes I considered useless.
I used to be for code reviews, but now I think that it requires people with strong self awareness, knowing difference between preference/feeling and objectively betters, and many programers out there don't have that. The seniors I had trouble with were on spectrum, one a little bit other a lot. They could not tell the difference and it cause a lot of problems beyond code reviews.
And if I tell you to re-implement working code my way simply because of some personal preference, i would expect you to tell me to fuck off. Cause that’s what i’d say if you did it to me.
To give you an idea of how our code reviews are perceived, we have one junior dev, at last retrospective she spoke up about how much she valued and appreciated them.
Obviously some places don’t get it, but i think we do.