I want to believe that can work. There's a neat idealism to the final approver being responsible for any bug fixes. It's encourages knowledge sharing prevent knowledge silos; the approver needs to be well versed enough to fix bugs.

But the reality is that it also risks pushing away those who go out their way to conduct more reviews.

Every team I've been on has had a mix of developers, some of whom are responsive to doing code reviews and will pick them up and process them quickly. There are also those developers who drag their feet, only pick up reviews when they're the only one who can review that area of the codebase, and take their time.

The former developers are displaying the habits you'd like to encourage more widely, and yet they find themselves "punished" by getting even more reviews, as people learn to assign things to them when they want a PR handled effectively.

I fear that compounding that by layering on another obligation to the star team members would further push them out.