I dare say review is often way more important than the act of laying down code.

I agree, it's just not particularly fun.

For me fun left the room around 2016, but I can relate.

Now it's just work. There's not a ton of pride in it.

This is how I feel. I do enjoy "vibe coding" significantly more at home on my own projects as there just aren't the same consequences I face at work if something goes left. I'm now working a place where there are only three or four of us in the code base and it still makes for some long days where it's mostly review. That part sucks. I can't imagine trying to keep my arms around a codebase at a larger shop in the current environment.

Yeah, that's the other part that's really hard. It seems really easy for the shape and layout of a codebase to change under your feet. It also ends up being hard to know exactly what is where and what it does. It makes it easy for the AI to recreate something that doesn't fit with the rest of the codebase. For example, I've seen LLMs generate code that completely ignored the built in tools for an existing code base and reinvented everything.