> We absolutely expect our reviewers to fully understand the code.
I suspect you don’t work as a DE or your company has top notch culture. I have never worked in any companies (including some big ones) that encourage a full understanding of any code submitted to PR review.
more or less the entire point of code review is to ensure that the reviewer fully understands the code that they review
i know that lots of orgs don't do it this way, but it's really important to make this point very clear: those orgs are wrong, and pathological, no matter how many of them there are
I want to agree with you. But I'd argue that for some career paths it is just impossible, and it is definitely impossible for my company. That's why I never consider myself as an engineer -- and I'm fine with it, because I don't love what I do. I take my side projects more engineer-ish.