Reviews were always meant to be about more than just finding bugs, thanks for mentioning that.
Nowadays I'll ask a question to, for example, try to understand why was a particular abstraction chosen, and I'll get a response from a robot, sometimes without even a disclaimer that the response came from a robot (it's still somewhat easy to spot due to the shape and style of the prose).
It does make me feel like there is nobody on the other side, especially working remotely, so I think I relate to your feeling of isolation.
Sometimes I care about how some change impacts the broader application moving forward, not really the specific technical tradeoffs for one construct or another, and that's, more often than not, very lacking.
Nowadays I'll ask a question to, for example, try to understand why was a particular abstraction chosen, and I'll get a response from a robot, sometimes without even a disclaimer that the response came from a robot (it's still somewhat easy to spot due to the shape and style of the prose).
It does make me feel like there is nobody on the other side, especially working remotely, so I think I relate to your feeling of isolation.
Sometimes I care about how some change impacts the broader application moving forward, not really the specific technical tradeoffs for one construct or another, and that's, more often than not, very lacking.