One interesting detail in this post is the comment they made about pulling down the PR branch themselves, setting up the test harness, running it, etc. That is

One interesting detail in this post is the comment they made about pulling down the PR branch themselves, setting up the test harness, running it, etc. That is remarkably time consuming. Given the complexity of many of the systems I've had the privilege of working on, that would easily take an hour for a single PR before I could even begin reviewing, to say nothing of the potential disruption to my own work in the same code base. In my experience, this is where a better CI/CD pipe with automated precommit checks shines. Does the code at hand do what the author said it would? Do the tests they added to exercise it cover the right cases? Is anything amiss? Can we improve code quality? Let your automated tests handle the rest. If there's one thing I agree with the author on, trust has to start somewhere. Time a problem? Setup a small PR meeting. Let the author brief folks on what it does, encourage honest feedback, and if possible approve it in the same timeframe. Works great also for large PRs that tend to scare folks away (i.e. mass refactorings, etc.).