I agree with your sentiments here. A specific, trivial example of this would be a distributed systems architecture where mutex locks are being employed (or real

I agree with your sentiments here. A specific, trivial example of this would be a distributed systems architecture where mutex locks are being employed (or really any distributed structures like queues, pub/sub, etc). Trying to review a PR for a single service that is interacting with locks across a dozen or more other services would be fraught with assumptions and missing context. You could make the claim that if documentation is perfect, that makes the situation better for the reviewer. But this is neither a practical expectation, nor does it completely mitigate the problem. EDIT: forgot to note that this is where bottlenecks in review are, in my experience. Not in the first-order review of syntax and semantics in the single file being reviewed.