Reproducing the issue resulted in an immediate fix by the swe.
Again, i understand why it is the way it is, it is just really interesting to see how specialized each engineer is in the grand scheme of things.
Abstractly, we got pushback from QA about this policy. After we had gathered a couple of concrete examples, it was clear that QA-as-gatekeeper when the factory is already in the worst possible state wasn't valuable. We do mandate the normal reviews but allow them after deployment. (You can imagine the conversations with the auditors about this as well, so we had to carefully document that this was our process and made the auditors audit our conformance to the process not to their own preconception of what it should be.)
It's especially not true when big amount of money is at stake. (like ads).
Edit: last sentence.