I had always seen code review process as partially a knowledge sharing exercise, so fine, maybe none of the 3 other engineers had previously seen those vendor docs, but part of the process is to retrace the steps and see if (with the benefit of hindsight) the reviewer would reach the same conclusion

> Code reviews in my prior experience solved nothing

I find that assertion suspicious, unless the culture was "push the approval button without even reading because ship,ship,ship"