Ask HN: Engineer won't approve my PR

I've encountered this situations a few times where, once I've joined a team, an existing senior engineer (often the one seen as a lead, but never officially recognized as such) rejects relatively minor things on my PR (these are not things in the coding spec, usually both function, usually it's an argument of the form "What if x then y then z happened?", sometimes I think my preference is slightly objectively better)

In these situations I try to tease apart if this is psychology thing ("asserting dominance" or "hazing"), because the way these engineers argue in PR is often very black/white.

For reference I'm more senior career-wise than most of these engineers, but it happens most when I'm new to the company. The last thing I want is 1-hour arguments over minutia or a protracted mutual suspicion. The problem is worse for me when the engineer is remote.

Of those who have been in that situation and conquered it (i.e. the other person would admit they have things they can learn from you / considers you a friend), how did you do it?