Ask HN: How do you successfully nitpick during a code review?

I've been writing code for nearly a decade at various large companies and have seen code quality vary drastically from team to team even within the same company. I like to think that I hold the standard for my code quality to a pretty high standard In in terms of readability, best practices, modularity, and the likes.

One of the projects I maintain now has a few people contributing to it, but the majority of the contributions are mine (~90% according to git).

When other people submit code for me to review, I am often distracted by the quality of the code in the pull request and find myself requesting tons of changes that have to do with the code quality itself (better variable naming, hiding implementations behind clean interfaces to reduce clutter, breaking large functions into smaller, more readable chunks, etc). This leads to me focusing less on the functionality of the code, but more on the style which wastes a lot of time.

This is a frustrating experience both for me, and for the person who is trying to submit code. My intent behind these requests isn't to nitpick, but to hold others to a high standard, and mostly keep the codebase clean so that the new code is easy enough to read for a new person on the team to jump in and contribute.

These requested changes are often ignored or are taken as optional suggestions that the person contributing.

So two questions: 1. Am I being overly pedantic when it comes to style and readability? 2. And if not, how can I best communicate to my teammates and other contributors that code quality is important and that these "nitpicks" are important?