If it's the first time - yeah, reach out to the person and talk to them.
But if the person is consistently leaving such comments under the guise of mentorship, 'raising the bar', or some other bullshit which boils down to them attempting to demonstrate their own seniority at the expense of other people's time and stress - then showing them how it feels is a great approach.
Bringing in other people and managers is not very effective I've found - it takes additional time, other people have their own stuff to focus on, and managers often don't have the technical expertise or confidence to push back against subjective comments which claim to be 'raising the bar' or whatever. It also doesn't look great when you have to bring other people in to help you address PR comments.
And, of course, you do this without ostensibly creating any conflict - if they complain simply respond along the lines of 'I totally love the care and attention to detail you bring when reviewing my PRs, I've learned from you and thought it would be appropriate to keep the same high standards and not lower the bar... etc'.
> As they go, if it isn't clear, I just ask them if something is a soft opinion or hard opinion.
Nah, if they don't explicitly state that's a soft opinion via 'nit', approving with comment or some other means, they are disrespecting the person who's PR they are reviewing. I shouldn't have to chase them down to see how strong their opinions are.
> If it keeps being in issue, then some frank conversations need to happen. Something I've noticed about folks who steadfastly focus on minor stylistic nits in CRs is they (1) tend to be cargo culting them without understanding the why behind them and (2) they're usually missing the forest (actual bugs in logic) for the trees.
What do you do if the comments are purely subjective and all backed up by internal/corporate dogmaspeak? 'Raising the bar' ... 'keeping the standards high' ... 'mentoring', etc. , or open ended comments asking to explain how stuff works, and whether 'this approach is the best'? There is no shortage of rhetorical bullshit that can be used to justify subjective PR comments.
> Most people are pretty reasonable when they don't feel like they're under attack, so in my experience it's usually possible to resolve these things without dragging it out.
The above will generally not work in a company that emphasizes PR comment count as a good metric for promotions/performance, and has a lot of internal rhetorical dogma. You WILL get people who leave these types of comments because they view it as a way of promoting their career, these people often cannot be reasoned with logically because they aren't actually all that smart, and they view any pushback against their comments as an attack against them.
Other people's feedback against the bullshit comments definitely help, but can look bad if you keep reaching out to other people to help address PR comments - I made sure to go through other people's PRs, on my own initiative, and refute bullshit comments when I realized how some people were behaving.
And yeah it totally depends on the company/team.