While I absolutely agree with "talk about the code itself" rather than beating around the bush in some manufactured discussion, why not just address the issue h

While I absolutely agree with "talk about the code itself" rather than beating around the bush in some manufactured discussion, why not just address the issue head on when is proper to do so, in CR, and build a culture where code critique is both acceptable and clearly ONLY a critique of the code at hand? I like to think that I could highlight mega_func in a cr to our team and go "extremely difficult to ingest this long a function as a human or modularly test it. Refactor would be welcome" and they would say "makes sense" and swap it in the same way as if someone pointed at one of my DB schemas and went "that's going to cause you problems because X and Y and I'm not sure what you were smoking when you decided on your constraints." We're professionals here but we're not perfect, and the faster we come to a shared understanding that this is fine, and it's part of professionalism to have each other's backs, the faster I've found my teams able to broach these issues without insult.