"everyone seems to be happy reviewing diffs, rather than the actual code?" The split view does show the actual new code, just with extra empty lines... so sure

"everyone seems to be happy reviewing diffs, rather than the actual code?" The split view does show the actual new code, just with extra empty lines... so sure it is a bit distracting if a lot of lines have been modified, but it rarely comes that far. My beef is more with some team's habit of doing too much work in a single pull request. Large diff are just a symptoms of that. I find that it is much more likely to introduce bugs and hard-to-find changes in behaviour in large changes. If you later find that something broke, finding what caused it in a large PR can be a real time waster.