I am very glad that has been your experience!

It depends very much on your coworkers, unfortunately. When a team is all pulling in the same direction, and is kind and constructive and rigorous, code reviews can be awesome.

In some companies, especially ones with stack ranking where one person doing better means someone else does worse, it is easy for them to go horribly awry and become an ordeal of a bug hunt. The obvious solution is to not work at horrible companies that pit engineers against each other, but when that describes some of the biggest employers in the industry it's easier said than done.