And this is the classic theme behind bikeshedding. People can understand that small PR at a glance, and there's always multiple ways of doing everything. There's a perverse desire to demonstrate productivity, and nagging at small PRs is a way to do that without a lot of effort; ironically reducing actual productivity, see: Cobra Effect.

That big PR though? Saying something intelligible about it requires serious effort. In a low-skill environment, nobody will touch the PR for fear of demonstrating that they don't know what they're talking about.

I disagree with the premise of the article. The ideal PR is a well-encapsulated unit of work. Sometimes you need to fix a typo or handle an edge case, and you make a 1-line PR. Sometimes you need to add a new module and you add 3 thousand-line files and put little hooks in 30 more files.