PRs don’t really hurt autonomy if stacked branches are used routinely. Those do hurt speed, yes, but not autonomy. PRs are so important that I‘d never skip them within a team.
If you have a policy in place that forces engineers to wait for review before merging each PR, then yes, by definition they have less autonomy. It might still be worth the trade off in your situation, but I like the suggestion in the article where senior devs can decide themselves whether they want their code reviewed or not.
Hard no buddy. Junior dev means junior code and junior judgement. Countless times we had prod issues because some dev thought the change was harmless and they didn't need review.
OP here.
In this one the closest is probably:
"I love the process at Pylon: engineers merge their own code and only request reviews if they need input, think they have a risky change, or are still onboarding. "
But I fully agree that for juniors it makes sense to have it mandatory.