Yes, it's long-winded, and unfortunately, it's really hard to get across with the above description that the workflow described therein actually is quite simple with the correct tools, and (at least in my opinion) also results in a technically superior outcome. Everything I described above is very intuitive and easy once you get into the groove with something like Phab or Gerrit.

Unfortunately, I think it's sort of lost on people today, because basically everyone is so stubborn about GitHub and you basically have to drag them kicking and screaming to most other tools, even if they have clearly superior UX, much less fundamental design. I used to run an open-source project and we used Phabricator and most of the regular contributors ended up liking it, but the initial hurdle for people was often like pulling teeth (and it felt like people who didn't contribute because of it never missed an opportunity to tell you so, though that may just be sour grapes on my part from hearing it so often.)

Absolutely GitHub is so mediocre. It's fine for most open source project workflows, but when I worked for a company that used it as their main tool I was blown away how badly it managed professional-level code reviews.

Gerrit isn't beautiful, and it also had a lot of knobs that could be tweaked in weird ways. But I do miss aspects of it.

I have been wanting to check out JetBrain's code review tool and see how it looks.