It's interesting: the original definition of "performative" is "a speech-act that changes something about the world".

And that basically describes all of programming: we are building metaphors that will run electricity at a higher or lower voltage, and be translated again into something meaningful to a different human.

In many ways, all we are doing is performing. And that is some of what makes this job challenging: the practices that build software well are all just ways of checking how humans will interact with the ones and zeros we've encoded.

Returning a PR because it doesn't have tests means that code will have automated validation, which is a real change. It also means the code will be written in a testable way: too often we don't realize we wrote code in a way that is hard to test unless we try to write the tests. And on a larger level, it means that this team of engineers will learn and use the practices and tools that lead to testable code and effective tests and more easily-changeable code.

It makes total sense to not keep reading if there aren't tests, because adding the tests can be expected to change the code. But just because that is a performance doesn't mean it doesn't profoundly change the world.