I am also in a conference-centric CS subfield, but I have published quite a lot in journals as well (both because of multidisciplinary collaborations and because my country has coarse-grained metric-based evaluation systems were conferences don't count much, so at least a part of my work has to go to journals to appease the system).
In my experience, journal reviewing is much worse, and especially much more corrupt, than conference reviewing.
At conferences you get bad actors with almost no oversight or accountability, true. But at least they typically don't have an axe to grind, because accept/reject decisions tend to be binary (there is no "revise and resubmit", at most optional recommendations for the final version that aren't effectively enforced).
At journals, the "revise and resubmit" option gives reviewers and editors a lot of leverage to push papers their way, and I have very often seen reviewers tacitly and subtly hint that the paper would easily be accepted if the authors included three or four references to papers by Author X (which are irrelevant to the subject matter, but of course, Author X will be the reviewer or a friend). Sometimes it's clear that the reviewers didn't read the paper, their sole interest on it is that you include their citations, that's the reason why they accepted to review and all they look at. Editors could in theory prevent this, but often they just echo reviewer comments, and sometimes they are complicit or even the originators of the corruption (it's also typical that the editor asks to cite a bunch of papers from the same journal, even if they're not related, because that inflates impact factor). In any of these cases, since the author is in a position of weakness and there's always the career of some PhD student or other down the line, one doesn't typically dare to complain unless the case is really blatant (which is typically not, because they know how to drive the point subtly). It's easier to go along with it, add the citations (knowing that they will lead to acceptance) and move on.
This has happened to me very often and I'm not talking about shady special issues in journals that print papers like sausages, I'm talking about the typical well-regarded journals from major traditional publishers. In conferences I've gotten all sorts of unfair rejections, of course, but at least the papers I've published accurately reflect my views, I can stand behind them. In journals, maybe half of my papers have this material that doesn't make sense and was added to appease a corrupt reviewer.
I find that many CS authors who haven't had to publish in journals have a "grass is always greener" mentality, and expect that if we moved to journals we would find a fairer review process... and if at some point we do so, they will receive a blow of reality (not saying it's your case, of course. There can also be people who have published in journals and disagree with me due to different experiences! And there are some journals that don't tend to engage in that kind of corruption, only that there are not many of them).