Take a moment to consider that someone else in your team might actually understand the code in question, and when you rewrite it (and commit), you destroy their knowledge about how it works. Sure, from your perspective, you made the code better, easier to understand. From their perspective, even if they do the code review themselves, they will not understand it as thoroughly as you do, and they will be burdened with both the knowledge of how it used to be, and how it is now. The net result can be negative, and eventually no one understands any code that they didn't refactor in the last ~6 months, because if it's any older than that, someone's rewritten it.

Sometimes you gotta sit down and bite the bullet and read and ask questions.