I'm advocating against self-appointed police setting themselves up as arbiters of style and technique, who delay projects by weeks and multiply the effort required to pass their arbitrary notions of how a pointer should be compared to null or whatever. Its insulting, pointless and aggravating, especially when you spend Labor Day weekend cranking to get a feature ready for a demo, but can't check it in Monday because so-and-so doesn't like some style issue.

Sounds like valid criticism of a particular review process or reviewer, not reviews as a general gate to pushing code. I’ve worked at places without mandatory code review and the code in those places is consistently awful.

I've never experienced anything else along those lines, so your mileage may vary of course. But once a company falls into this trap, its not something the new guy can fix.