Compare Humphries' statement: "None of the classic papers on DNA, nor Einstein’s four in his miracle year, were peer reviewed.
with this quote from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review (emphasis mine):
> Peer review became a touchstone of the scientific method, but until the end of the 19th century was often performed directly by an editor-in-chief or editorial committee. Editors of scientific journals at that time made publication decisions without seeking outside input, i.e. an external panel of reviewers, giving established authors latitude in their journalistic discretion. For example, Albert Einstein's four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were peer-reviewed by the journal's editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien, both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of these papers.
The latter quote supports your expectation that Einstein's work was indeed scrutinized by his peers.
I'll use that distinction between internal and external peer review to analyze this quote by Humphries: "And the media have dealt with this explosion by consistently pointing out when research has not yet been peer reviewed. Presumably they do this to warn the reader that the research lacks the safeguards that peer review brings."
This means the media is reporting that a given preprint has had neither internal peer review by an editor, nor external peer review.
Now extrapolating this outside of niche science and into research that is underpinning policy decisions (or tenure and promotion decisions), of course one would expect it to undergo some kind of review. And if something had not, and was just a preprint being circulated, it's a pretty important consideration that its not yet part of established canon.
Certainly I agree there are lots of flaws with peer review, that a system that originally evolved to build out the body of accepted knowledge in a field had now been formalized and used for other purposes, and that it can be gamed. But it don't find it credible to say that we just don't need it, and that we shouldn't distinguish between new results and better scrutinized ones.