nobody on the team got slower at review. agents and juniors are opening more PRs every month and the hours seniors have for reading them stayed exactly where they were.
the usual fix is adding another AI reviewer. it reads the same diff the first one did, so you get more comments on the lines that were already visible.
the changes that page someone at night usually sit outside the diff. a shared default that every service leaned on, a caller in a file nobody opened, a retry stacked on top of another retry.
and whoever clicks merge still owns what breaks.
so keep the bar for merging where it is and change what it's based on. judge each PR by what it touches around it, then spend the slow read on the few that need it. the rest get a normal pass.
