[karlmeissner]

Often, different approaches can be used to solve a given requirement. So debate is needed.

But it could be that your team was just divided on approach and style.

They were struggling because they were trying to work out their differences through PR comments. That will be frustrating for everyone. Somebody went and got the PR working "the other way," and now the reviewer is trying to get the author to change the PR to "their way". If it goes on long enough, your devs will head for "the highway"...

If you just mandate "test pass = pr accepted," it will unblock your team short term, but in the long term, the large system will gravitate into many tiny, fiercely defended fiefs, each with different styles. Maintenance will be slow. Debugging will be complex. Wide-reaching refactors will be prone to blockage.

Fix the coding by having the team spend time "not coding." Establish a proposal and design process where an author needs to get team buy-in before they can implement. Establish an accepted standard on coding style. Do wide reviews on critical features and highlight issues where flow needs to go from one end of the system to the other and there are weird boundaries. Do the RCA (root cause analysis) and ask the "five whys". Look for patterns of issues and address them soon rather than pushing them to the back of the backlog. Prefer many small incremental changes over few large changes.