Ultimately version control is about easily merging changes from people working on different machines.

Being able to "review" changes as clean set of patches is not essential.

The mindset of "we must review every change before it goes in" is not based in reality anyway.

Have you ever seen a system of code reviews produce useful benefits that would not be there without it?

You can always review already-committed code and discuss it within the team. It does not need to happen at commit time.