I’d much rather praise them when they do something well, but this is so hard to spot when just reading over committed code. All the obstacles they cleared are not visible in there.
This is SO true and exactly why code reviews always feel like a beat down (even when they’re not). There’s no visibility into the truly good work that’s already been done.
No and, in fact, this was (and still is) a selling point of Git over the alternatives (e.g. Subversion) available at the time that required you to “check out” some code and no one else could check out/modify that code while you had it checked out.