[kkoste]

Their pride have probably been hurt. "Everything went fine for years and now after a few outages we suddenly get a babysitter".

You haven't fallen into a trap. The people that are working there are probably talented but socially inept. Make the changes you think you need to make. I suggest you move away from the coding role - if they want to act like children then treat them like children. Set op CI. Do the code reviews and make sure that things can't get pushed to production without you reviewing it. I don't think they are deliberately going after your commits - but that they just know more about the system than you do. Basically take the dev-ops role. It also helps you to learn more about the system as a newcomer. When doing code review you will inevitable have to make contact with them and they will have to learn to work with you. And they can't say no since their code wont get published to master otherwise.