one of the more useful things I realized at some point for how to be a good code reviewer is "that's not how I'd do it" is not constructive feedback and is not a valid reason to request a change, and if you can't think of an actual good reason to block a review, you can save a lot of time for everybody involved by just chilling out about it
life hack: live longer by dying on fewer hills
@aeva it was not until quite recently, in the grand scheme of things, that I had positive PR experiences that didn't involve pushback from a senior male employee that boiled down to (or was plainly stated as) this.

At my current job, in fact, I had a
shit ton of anxiety about PRs for probably the first six months due to numerous, numerous experiences where a PR was used to gatekeep and delay my contributions. Especially when I could look at other PRs where male colleagues were doing exactly the same thing and were approved without even a comment on it.

I'm not as anxious now specifically because I've received good feedback at my current job (not coincidentally, none of it was ever shaped like this).
@aud my last job (about 10 years ago) I worked at a place like that and they tracked individual "velocity" as a performance review metric. every single thing I'd try to submit took a week to get through review no matter how trivial.
@aud that team also did a thing where the entire team votes on the "point" score of a given ticket, and mine always got voted low for some reason 🙄
@aeva haaaaaaaaaaa wow that pisses me off.

and that is also familiar for reasons I'm not going to allow my brain to consider for now.
@aud I like to think in the long term I came out ahead for getting fired from that place, but I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
@aeva hey, what a surprise, I was also 'laid off' from the place that blocked my PRs.
@aud @aeva I once had a PR gatekept for *over a year* for literally no stated reason.
@aud @aeva I've also had a PR gatekept over a disagreement about a *code comment*. I wish I was exaggerating.
@be @aeva "tech is a meritocracy", typically said by trust fund assholes who wrote code once that also sucked....
@aud @aeva But of course the problem was me being mad about getting treated this way repeatedly over years, so I was the one who had to get pushed out, not the one guy repeatedly doing this shit.