Having worked many years in a place that did 100% pair programming, switching to a PR company definitely leaves things to be desired. TFA does mention feedback coming back too late in the process, and it definitely feels like the feedback timing is too late for a lot of code. I've thrown away a lot of PRs over the years for reasons that varied from not getting good info up front, to not having someone to accept the PR in busy environments, to silly mistakes. Pairing just seems like a great way to avoid a lot of nonsense. It has so many upsides like cross-pollination of ideas and skills, training, avoiding getting stuck on little snags that end up sucking up time, and so much more.
My team does Mob programming (pair programming but with more than 2 developers). In addition to all of those benefits you mentioned, we also have noticed that it helps us keep focused on the task at hand (harder to slack off when the team is all there pushing forward) and has resulted in far less bugs than before. It also results in more code refactoring than we would ever do if we worked solo.
