Comment by saagarjha

> And if Bob doesn't get to do that he will leave.

Maybe he should.

> If Bob has to put up with low quality code because Alice can't get the basics right but he also isn't allowed to point out basic mistakes in code review, he will leave.

There's a difference between nitpicks and "gets basic things wrong" or "doesn't format their code". Remember that Alice is 0.9 of Bob: she's not there fighting with him on formatting (everyone has CI do this anyway, lol) or getting basic things wrong. She's getting comments like "hmm, this API you use could be a bit better, could you also refactor that while you're at it?" or "can you make this more general to support this use case that we don't actually need right now, but could potentially need later?" I guarantee you, regardless of how smart you are, there are a multitude of ways I could tie up your review for a long time. And this happens all the time in projects with very smart people working on it.