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I'm guilty of getting stuck up on trivial formatting issues. When someone pushes a commit that has random whitespace (trailing or arbitrary newlines all over, or just inconsistent spacing), it feels sloppy. Same for many other simple things. If the code is unnecessarily superficially ugly, it sets up a block in my mind that makes it harder to focus on the real issues.

Is it wrong to kick this stuff back and tell devs to make it pretty first?

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I believe that ugly code is usually buggy code. If someone didn't take the time to deal with trivial issues like formatting then it makes me wonder if they spent time thinking hard about the actual problem they were trying to solve.

I usually explicitly do code reviews in 2 passes. I look for low level problems first, and also try to identify ways that they can be tested using tools so that next time they are caught before the code is sent for review. My second pass looks at higher level problems with the overall design and checks the functionality to make sure it matches the objectives.

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