I didn't have enough leverage in that company to say such things and the project had already been running for a couple of years when I joined (not greenfield).

I didn't have enough leverage in that company to say such things and the project had already been running for a couple of years when I joined (not greenfield). The last greenfield project which I managed from scratch, we didn't have this problem because all developers shared the same mental model of what we were building before we wrote any code. We had a lot of discussions beforehand to get to this shared understanding. There was literally not a single PR which surprised me throughout the entire project and I'm sure none of my PRs were a surprise to any of my team mates either. There was plenty of disagreement throughout but it was always fully resolved through discussion before we started coding each major feature.