Why Every Pull Request Needs an Explainable Merge Decision

Some pull requests waste a surprising amount of time without anyone touching the code. They look almost ready, but the conversation turns into process debugging: what is still blocking this? which approval is missing? is this check actually required? do we need another team here? why is GitHub still not letting this merge? That is a bad trade. Code review time should go to design, correctness, maintainability, and risk, not branch protection detective work. Review quality drops when readiness is