I agree with you. To me, the action felt wrong when he described it. I wasn't sure why at first, but I think perhaps because the work was not in service to any

I agree with you. To me, the action felt wrong when he described it. I wasn't sure why at first, but I think perhaps because the work was not in service to any actual task. If he was in charge of writing the next piece of functionality for that code, it would be poor teamwork to completely refactor it without discussing the reasons for the design, but at least it would have been within his area of responsibility. This is also the reason why I like having code review. The review would have been a good place to raise his concerns. They could have had their eventual conversion earlier, before feelings were hurt or wasted efforts were made. It would even help in the opposite case, where the author's code was legitimately poor and the reviewer had good suggestions. It's not a panacea, but I find code review helpful. In my experience, review was the time when a lot of knowledge-sharing occurred. Some might feel that only senior developers should review, but as a junior I learned a lot about why the author made the choices they did. I learned how people expected the code to change, about language features or pitfalls, etc., and it helped me grow as a developer.