To your note about nobody doing code reviews. I've found that to be fine in fairly straightforward applications and/or small teams where individual SWEs can own verticals.

As soon as you have larger teams with complex architectures trying to make decisions and push larger initiatives forwards, decisions made in one part of the stack really matter in other parts as they get built on and have momentum that can be hard to reverse, even if code is cheap.

Not to shill my work too much (https://www.archme.io) but I think for the reason above the importance of code review has moved from code to architecture, and code in general is the wrong abstraction to be working with as a human engineer in 2026+.