[cmrdporcupine]

That honestly sounds very atypical. I've been at Google 9 years and never experienced the scenario you describe. You should probably have reached outside of your team for assistance or flagged a manager.

Yes, there have been times when code review wasn't super useful, but on the whole I never experienced the kind of dysfunction you're talking about and merging reviews without external review is a pretty big no-no.

[ggm]

2015 was 6 years ago. Google as possibly changed? Doubled in size (or more) by staff? has more rigorous approaches? has more people capable of meaningfully reviewing code?