Maybe the studies know a lot more than I do and perhaps I'm wrong, but from where I'm sitting people who espouse the value code reviews act like it exists in a black-and-white vacuum; code reviews are either mandatory for absolutely every commit, or your team doesn't do code review. People who champion unit testing also have a similar mindset.
We're professional developers. It would be absurd to suggest that we shouldn't perform code reviews, nor test our code. What I'm arguing is that with a team of highly-competent developers there is no need to handcuff them with mandatory processes to slow them down and come between them and releasing software. I work at a university and it's absolutely soul-sucking that a CSS colour change takes at least 3 weeks with a minimum of 4 hours of overtime to hit production.
What I'm saying is that a team of competent developers can decide what to review, what to test. If I'm doing a big refactor, I should obviously have tests for that before starting the refactor, and I sh