Personally, I think they do have a role; having worked at companies where code review was informal and managed via email/chat, and companies where code review o

Personally, I think they do have a role; having worked at companies where code review was informal and managed via email/chat, and companies where code review occurs more openly via pull/merge requests and conversations transparent to all engineers, the tooling makes a big difference. I'd also go further and say that the way the tools and the workflows within them are designed ends up having an influence on the organizations that use them (and of course, there's a feedback loop there as the organizations request changes/features). This means there ends up being a real culture battle for transparency and accountability at the infrastructure and tooling level. Some people participating might not even consider the implications, but there are certainly vested interests who would prefer more closed/controlled environments, and competing interests who prefer more open and transparent environments which lend themselves to the kind of local fix / global fix / inquiry end of the spectrum mentioned in the article.