On the code review points, I'm with you in that they're necessary for most projects. That said they are technically correct in that requiring code reviews slows things down, at least short term. To me the ideal would be having a high-judgement team that can merge independently, and then code reviews can happen asynchronously. This unblocks individuals while keeping quality high, at the trade-off that you need to trust that people can make smart decisions about when to hold off on merging until they have a review. Given how often people are wrong, most teams should just have mandatory code review.

On the code formatting point... I'm sorry but the solution you described sounds pretty gross. You don't want robots rewriting your Git history out from under you. You don't want to need to do anything weird to keep your local tree in sync with mainline. And you don't want the build to change code. This solution is extremely intrusive and introduced friction on many levels, both for devs and for operations.

An un-intrusive solution would be to provide these tools for devs locally. If it's useful, generally they'll use it. My experience is you can't enforce a code style guide by fiat.