Instead, people nitpicked to death and tried to one-up each other with findings. There are loooong arguments over completely irrelevant details. There were multiple rounds of review, sometimes changing the code there and back again. People attempted to code into review comments. And the expectations changed every week, there was no stable standard.

It was more about taking control and showing yourself more caring by finding increasingly insignificant things and then insisting on them.

Code reviews can be a good thing or bad thing, depending on what each party brings in and intends to get out of them. Painting them unequivocally as bad is rather silly.

This is not necessarily in conflict with your statement.