I'm a western European programmer and my experience has been vastly different to yours. Of the 4 companies I've worked at, in 3 of them code reviews were there from the very start and the whole team engaged on them, reviewing and being reviewed, there was no verticality involved whatsoever.

The first one just didn't do reviews because it was a small startup that kept doing small POC for pitches where code quality wasn't a concern, and that one offered the juniors to set up a youtube channel showing the devices we worked with (it was VR related).

As for pay, the article didn't mention salary I think (?)