I agree with the others commenting here and can't relate to your experience at all. Review is a huge positive and while it does "slow things down" it usually is preventing people from slamming into walls at high speed, so that's a positive too.

Maybe your work experience is mostly in a high stress, prototype-heavy environment where it's more important to launch something than it is to have a maintainable, incrementally improving codebase? I worked at a consultancy like that and it was very different from "big product" long term work.

As for the social dynamics, it sounds like your workplace culture just blows.