I agree that formatters and static analysis tools are the best way to reduce trivial PR comments. However, I would say that the kinds of things addressed by for

I agree that formatters and static analysis tools are the best way to reduce trivial PR comments. However, I would say that the kinds of things addressed by formatters and static analysis tools, and similar issues that tools don't catch such as misspellings, are worth addressing in PRs. "Nitpicking" is in the eye of the beholder, and your company might have a particular culture problem that I haven't seen, but many of the things I've seen called "nitpicking" are legitimate readability issues. For example, a field named "customers" that holds a single customer can be a major readability hurdle for someone who is looking at code for the first time. Even if you discount readers' annoyance and discomfort, which I don't think you should, a single field named "cusotmer" can become a drag on readability if the misspelling gets amplified in the codebase or if some programmers on the project aren't native English speakers. (It can be much harder to mentally gloss over language errors that aren't in your native language.) Something I learned in school is that it's extremely hard to read something you've written as another person would read it. I had an English teacher that would split the class into pairs every time we had a paper to turn in, and in each pair, you would read the other person's paper out loud to them. The results were comical, and to most students entirely unexpected. Their whole school careers, they had thought teachers were being mean and nit-picky, until they got to see their friends struggle to read what they had written. Then they started to understand that a wrong word, a misspelling, a wrong verb tense, an ambiguous pronoun, could stop a reader in their tracks or send them down the wrong path trying to understand what the writer meant. They also learned that they could not see these issues in their own writing. When they read somebody else's writing, they would stumble over errors, but in their own writing, they had to make a special effort to see them, and even then, readers would effortlessly "discover" errors that the author had missed. For many programmers, PRs are their first and only opportunity to develop this empathy for readers, and if they reject the feedback, they're going to remain forever in the dark about how other people experience their code.