Why does accepting an edit require additional reviewers even when I as a reviewer can singlehandedly edit without any need for approval?

Question

This question has been asked more than ten years ago already, but was de-facto declined by a staff member.

Many questions in the field of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be presented as a runnable snippet. This allows for easy reproduction of the problem, and also to copy the given code to the answer with the simple click of a button.

Often times I find questions that contain potentially runnable code that is often badly formatted and not integrated in the form of a runnable snippet (mostly from low reputation SO users (< 5k)).

With these, many times I've run into the following situation:

I click on "Edit (1)" to edit the question, only to find someone who lacks enough reputation to edit questions without approval has already made the exact changes necessary to improve the question in the way described.

I have three options now:

1. Click Approve. This results in the question remaining in the unedited form for a long time, until another reviewer approves the edit too. You have already reviewed this item. It needs more reviews from other users to be completed.
2. Click Improve Edit, simply add a space character somewhere irrelevant and boom, the edit is live, but this seems like a bad workaround, because instead of what needs to be done - approving, I'm forced to pick improving (which doesn't happen since I have nothing to improve), only to achieve approving through the backdoor.
3. Click Reject and Edit, resulting in the user getting their "Rejected edits" count increased by one for all the wrong reasons, and redo what the current editor already achieved.

Given the situation that the suggested edit already does exactly what I would have done, had I edited the question myself, the correct choice appears to be to accept the edit, because factually there is nothing to improve about the edit, and also no reason to reject it.

Doing so, though, results in a question that still has no Copy snippet to answer button yet, more often than not discouraging me from answering, which originally I intended to do.

Wouldn't it make more sense, if you trust a user to edit a question with no approval necessary, to also allow that user to singledhandedly accept edits on those very same questions?

If the argument from that old answer is still considered valid, what else could be done to improve the described situation where neither 1., 2. nor 3. seems ideal?

Edit: Based on the comments, I'd like to suggest for discussion that reviewing edits should be treated differently based on whether the reviewer came from the review queue (which does not give the reviewer any control over which suggested edits they are being presented), or the reviewer came from the question itself (which should be safe to assume they wouldn't open if they were not interested in the question).

Answer 1

You're coming at this question from the vantage of seeing the edit suggestion on the post and wanting to improve it. So you're already somewhat invested in the post and that's good. What you're maybe forgetting is that most suggested edits are reviewed in the review queues and there are (unfortunately) some people who will go through those reviews extremely quickly without actually reading them - we refer to that as "robo-reviewing".

Most reviewers do read and review accurately but, because it happens often enough that people don't, by requiring two people to approve edits, it means we're more likely to have at least one of the two people actually reviewing the edit to make certain that it's complete and valuable. This is, essentially, what Grace Note says in their answer to the older question. We had data when we first released this feature that many terrible edits were just slipping through because people weren't reviewing carefully - so we require two reviewers.

So, in your case, you're investing time in working on editing the post - reviewing it carefully to ensure that nothing was missed in title, body and tags... so feel free to improve the edit because it's not uncommon for one or two small things to be missed and then save another reviewer the effort of reviewing the post, too.

But, all we ask is that you be thoughtful and thorough - that's what we want and why we require two reviewers in the first place.