>Code reviews help maintain sanity in the code base

But why delay the shipment of features/fixes to the customer for any of these reasons?

If code quality and human understanding is the actual rationale, it could make more sense to review code after it has shipped. In that way, it would cease to be a bottleneck for the developers or customers. Additionally, any bugs that appear in production could be accounted for during the refactoring process.

Saying that there is value to a practice is the easy part. We're forgetting to ask when to code review and whether or not code review should ever be a blocker to other processes.