I did code reviews at Google for four years and it never felt like a burden, more like a part of my job that feels gratifying and useful. I also loved knowing that every single line of code I wrote was going to be reviewed.
Pair programming is not used at all at Google, mostly for all the bad reasons cited in the article. And also because code reviews really do work (admittedly, Google has a fantastic infrastructure to support it).
Plus code review has an inherent context switch (for the reviewer) that is even worse during a crunch time.