And believe me I hate being defeatist, it made me a lot angrier when I was younger and I consider it to be one of the things that stopped me trying to go down the academic route so far.

While coders (who aren't just being boosters for particular technologies) have to live with the fact that the world is run on mountains of bad code, scientists of anyone engaging with academia or journal papers has to sleep at night realising how much bad science is being done and how much the publication process is skewed to publishing and politics over quality or fact checking.

I can no more fix it than I can fix all software bugs or politics in big corporations...

I think you're making it to be a bigger deal than it actually is. Most of these things are just noise. We just ignore it. If someone rises to prominence with outrageously fake results, rest assured that they will get shot down quickly by concurrents (all the incentive to publish fake results lies within highly competitive fields). If you know what you're doing, and work in a lab where people know what they're doing too, you can still do pretty good science. I would guess than in all communities, academic or not, there's a nonzero amount of bogus, over-hype, nepotism, politics and what not, and a subset of people who actually get things done and make the whole field advance. After a while, the test of time truly determines what was actually useful from what is bunk. That's how it's always been.