I agree with him anyway: if every dev felt comfortable hitting a stop button to fix a bug then reviewing might not be needed.
The reality is that any individual dev will get dinged for not meeting a release objective.
Now I work at a company where reviews take minutes. We have 5 lines of technical debt per 3 lines of code written. We spend months to work on complicated bugs that have made it to production.
Everyone was very highly paid, managers measured everything (including code review turnaround), and they frequently fired bottom performers. So, tradeoffs.
You do a lot of small changes (<100 loc) that get reviewed often. If it doesn't get reviewed often then the whole idea of continuous development breaks down.
Argueable you have 8 hours of work a day. How many of them do you need to write 100 loc? After that 100 loc or maybe 200 take a break and review other people's code.
Plus you also have random meetings and stuff so your day already fragments itself so adding a code review in the time before a meeting or after is "free" from a fragmentation standpoint.
I have an issue at work that will likely be solved by a single line change. But figuring out which line it is is going to take awhile.
So it really doesn't matter when the review gets done. I mean, even a week and it's fine.
But some people will put up with a lot for half a million dollars a year.
My ideal system (for work) would be something like: after 2 days, ask for a review if the reviewer hasn't given it. After a week, warn them the PR will be auto-approved. After 2 weeks, auto-approve it.
At some moment I realized that reviews are holding things back most of all. I started to jump to review my team's code ASAP. I started to encourage others to go review things ASAP. It works even in relatively large companies, as long as your team has a reasonable size.
This can be learned, taught, and instilled.
We had a "support rota", i.e. one day a week you'd be essentially excused from doing product delivery.
Instead, you were the dev to deal with big triage, any code reviews, questions about the product, etc.
Any spare time was spent looking for bugs in the backlog to further investigate / squash.
Then when you were done with your support day you were back to sprint work.
This meant there was no ambiguity of who to ask for code review, and limited / eliminated siloing of skills since everyone had to be able to review anyone else's work.
That obviously doesn't scale to large teams, but it worked wonders for a small team.
The code quality was much better than in my current workplace where the reviews are done in minutes, although the software was also orders of magnitude more complex.