Comment by lmm
I can believe there's some benefit, but my experience has been that peer reviews sap productivity a lot - people spend a lot of time on them, and worse, they can cause a breakdown in team trust as people wonder which colleague said something that meant they didn't get the raise they deserved. So while I don't fully agree with the author, I do think it's important to consider the cost.
I think that's fair. I have noticed people going out of the way in the time immediately preceding peer reviews to be nice and avoid confrontation to a point where it feels very artificial. There's definitely added stress around those times as well. Where I am we do two reviews a year. In a previous company we did one peer review a year. Both places are very peer review centric and I generally prefer doing this once a year. The process overall is fairly lightweight- you don't spend more than a few hours on it unless you're a manager.