[alain94040]

the labour cost of having an intern/entry level engineer spend ~30-60s looking through these is likely close to $0.20

Did you do the math? Your estimate feels way off. First, I doubt an intern would process one PR in 30s. Maybe 2-3 minutes, to read 10 lines carefully looking for typos and indentation mistakes. We pay interns close to $100K these days (in a company like CloudFlare), so that's ~80c/minute. My estimate is therefore closer to $1.6 per PR. About 10X.

You are correct that there is a residual value with the intern, over time they would start learning (a little bit) about the code base.

[MeetingsBrowser]

$100k is probably at the top end. Even at Cloudflare, interns are more likely to be making $25-40/hour according to levels.fyi, which works out to $52-83k.