Yeah, this is the kind of "everybody's empowered to push back and insist on doing things correctly" environment that people normally praise. Or at least, they praise until they realize that people will push back and insist on quality, and then they decide it's stifling and prevents them from getting anything done.
The problem is when the push back is not standardized. I've seen bad code go through with comments like "we can deal with these things in a later PR or two" but then other code gets flagged for "it fixes one problem but it could fix three other things too" which increases scope. An inconsistent standard is better than no standard but it's just as frustrating.
It's all a balance though, right? And really, about the flexibility of the environment. You have to be able to recognize and deal with a broad spectrum of priorities - this, at least, was not prioritized highly enough across the environment and that meant it wasn't handled gracefully.