So, just to be clear, you think the right level of abstraction that codebase rules should operate at is, "the codebase should be accessible to programmers in every country across the world without modification" even when no such programmers operate on the codebase or are likely to ?

Do you apply this rule uniformly, or just to spellings?

The level of time-wasting here is off the charts. Write code to solve problems. If you have an international team, have international standards, if you do not -- it does not matter.

If any of this changes, literally, apply a regex. OP is a blog article about rules for a code review -- as if the relevant part of the review is spelling ? Are we mad?

Code review isnt to enforce these superficial standards -- these are regexes/flags in a build process. Code review is to ensure the code solves the problem under functional/non-functional constraints, in a manner which is easy to understand, communicates intention, etc.

Anyone talking about whether something is pluralised in a code review is a person who should be no where near any such process. They are clearly pathologically incapable of prioritisation or completely uninterested in review.