We ask for code reviews all the time, we simply don't mandate them - I think that's the main difference.
Isn't that 'after the fact', considering your teamcity polls the gitlab repo a lot, so a commit will trigger a build right after it, and if everything goes well, deploy it too?
So you have to know up front whether a thing is 'risky', but that's a subjective term.
So yes, it will build to dev, but we're using this in situations where we're very confident the changes are correct already. I'd argue blind pushes are the problem otherwise. If the developer is not very certain: they can open a merge/pull request or just hop on a hangout to do a review.
Ah missed / overlooked that!