My question is: why are we waiting until code review to do all of those things? > > I’ve never particularly liked pull requests as the centre of the software development process. Not because engineers shouldn’t look at each other’s code, but because I’ve always struggled with the idea that we should build something, finish it, package it up, throw it over to somebody else and then have the important conversation about whether we built the right thing in the right way.

I didn't think this is a controversial take (except for some of the solutions proposed) design and high level implementation shouldnt be happening in code review. that's way to late in the process.