It was more important for giant C or fortran code bases. You will legit catch pointer errors or memory mgmt stuff, going line by line. Once Sun busted in with Java is when I really saw the shift to skim reviews. So much stuff is caught by compilers now, or SAST, that using dev time to find code smells is mostly a waste of their time. And it's not like the old way caught everything, it's just that the stuff we take for granted being caught by compilers or Sonarqube now, just used to get shipped to prod and cause abends and production support calls at 3am.