The "work to rule" concept can be quite effective in a programmer's hands. Be militantly pedantic about requirements: fulfill them, but nothing that wasn't written in the spec. This can result in a pushback process where managers need to do ever more work specifying the work they want done; developers get smarter about poking holes, and productivity grinds to a halt.
One example, thanks to a recent article by Rachel By the Bay: badly crafted queries can bring an organization to a halt.
I think "work to rule" is a large company's dream. "Things are moving slowly because our rockstar developers have to get their code reviewed!" "Excellent, I guess we'll need to hire a team to manage the code review process more closely." <1 year passes> "Wow Bob, the size of your org tripled. You are doing three times as much work, so please enjoy this new title and a yacht!"
That's if you only make it personnel-expensive. If your code is also blowing up computational requirements, it'll make it hardware-expensive too -- but as you note, even that might be a boon for somebody. If the crap performance impacts customers, or managers doing their jobs, then dissatisfaction will mount.
Hitting "LGTM" without actually reviewing the change.