I did my phd in experimental physics and I have to say my realisation of this large point, that papers are little more than resume padding to lock in an achievement was a significant contributor towards destroying, and I use destroying seriously here, any faith or trust that peer review or publishing has anything at all to do with the scientific method at all.

Your results replicate, or they don't. Your calculations, equations, and models predict experiment. Or they don't.

Writing papers about it and getting the feedback of "peers" is nothing more than an old fashioned circle jerk for padding resumes, CVs, and persuading other people in that academic hierarchy that you deserve funding. It is a game that is divorced from actually learning, researching, understanding, measuring, and predicting the world.

In academia there always is a difference between the way results are advertised and what conclusions are drawn internally. This is more true in some fields than others, I'm most familiar with it ML, Physics. Part of your skill as a researcher is to understand based on omissions, the datasets etc. the quiet part that isn't said out loud. Depending how you sell things you can get a Nature / Science paper with confusing inconsistent terminology, hand rolled C++ implementation, provided you are the first and a another method which might be 1000x times faster will only make it into PRL (yes I'm thinking of two specific papers, but won't say which).

There's probably space for a startup that properly archives the technical nature of findings.

+1

Counterpoint: citations are a valuable currency in science. Arguably one of the best ways to earn citations is to do good work and write clear papers.

Not saying incentives are perfectly aligned -- many citations are superficial ("this topic was studied before"), and papers count for a lot even if they're never cited, etc