> "I've done all this work, get put of my way and submit" is the attitude in both cases.

That’s quite a stretch. Nobody should be “in your way” to begin with. In a company, you are on a team and the point of a team is to work together; not get in each other’s way. That’s a sign of a dysfunctional team, which is how you end up getting team members working on the wrong thing or implementing things wrongly in the first place. Code not up to “standards” is not a reason to reject code, it’s a sign that something else is wrong on the team and that is the thing to be addressed, not the code. You aren’t going to resolve it in a code review.

I don’t know how else to say that at this point.

> The default answer to code review feedback is always "sure" unless you have a strong argument otherwise.

I’ve definitely pointed out why a deleted line needs to be kept. I would not be surprised if that someone came back to tell me why it should be deleted. As a reviewer, I lack a lot of context even if I originally wrote the code. I’d never, ever, expect someone to blindly say “sure” on a code review. I don’t write perfect code and neither do my team members, so I don’t expect a perfect reviewer.

A team works together to make the code perfect, nobody is writing mystery code and doing weird stuff without discussing it with the team first. And sure, people experiment and we review it, but with an architectural lens. Then when we are happy with the architecture, we actually implement it, together.