If that's what they wanted they'd mandate that process. They want the deniability of having you rubber stamp the PR. That way they can blame you when it goes wrong. There may be high trust teams, but I've never seen one firsthand, but my sample size is only N=5.
Before I became a SW engineer, I've worked in such teams (you "own" the quality, but they want you to do it so quickly that you can't really own it).
I left. I will always recommend finding a new job when you have dishonest management. (Dishonest by not admitting they are lowering the quality.)
Fortunately, none of my jobs since that job had that problem. They either allow good quality reviews, or they explicitly accept the technical debt that comes out of it and don't blame me for poor codebases.
(But then again, I make sure to probe these things during the interview process...)
> I make sure to probe these things during the interview process
I absolutely plan to do so throughly when I begin interviewing later this year. But I've been fooled before, so it'll take extraordinary evidence to get my hopes up, and I don't think I'll ever truly believe it again. There's always the possibility it isn't real or I'm misunderstanding something.
If you ever trust an employer you put yourself at a profound disadvantage. Employers are not so disadvantaged by placing (judiciously earned) trust in employees. That's because employers are companies, and companies are not people.
Then remove the whole process and let it go through automatically. I've worked in high trust teams where we would do that - there was no gate.