Look at arxiv.org, that papers there are made purely by academics from start to finish and are already publication grade (if not better).

(That said, typesetting and writing are more and more often offloaded to academics, but there's also things like e.g. making HTML versions and system-readable versions [1] available, which is a cumbersome manual process.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesti...

So yes, peer review is useful, but it also often happens after publication at arXiv, outside of the journal submission.

Paying the reviewer doesn't incentivise them to accept or reject only to actually do the review. As it stands, in many fields reviewers are far from experts in the area they're reviewing but only in the same general discipline. Papers sail through review without proper statistical oversight, because what statistics expert is going to spend their time reviewing psych or bio articles when that's not their discipline?

Well if we paid people to do what amounts to some of the most important work in science, maybe we'd get actual experts to do it!

No one suggests that paying programmers to program results in shoddier work. There just needs to be an accountability and feedback system just like in any other industry.

The editor would still pick reviewers based on reputation, they'd just get a lump sum along with the work.