Comment by jghn

I agree, and why I hate that this has become a thing. I encountered the same thing as the GP which is from where my experience comes. I'd ask "Why did you choose X over Y" as I'm genuinely curious to know what tradeoffs were considered that led them to choose X. Perhaps there's something I don't know. But I also see it get used all the time to mean "you should have done Y".

The "we" stuff is similar. There was a movement several years ago to try to remove blame/harshness from the tone of code reviews, and this is what we got out of it.