[withinboredom]

> 15 minutes of review time means you basically are only going to accept trivial changes.

Um, yes. This is 100% the point. There is no amount of refactoring, bug fixing, or features that cannot be expressed as a chain of trivial changes.

What you usually see happen is that instead of spending a week experimenting with 15 different refactors, is that an engineer opens a PR with what they think they're going to try first. Other engineers point out how they had tried that before and it didn't work; but maybe this other way will. So, they end up "working together" on the refactor instead of one developer getting lost in the sauce for a week seeing what sticks to a wall.

In essence, about the same amount of time is spent; but the code is higher quality and no architecture reviews during code reviews (which is another rule that should exist on a team -- architecture reviews should happen before a single line of code is touched).