More often than not peer review acts as gatekeeping rather than actual analysis of the data and methods. The people who do peer review are often those with institutional political power rather than proper "peers".

This is such a bizarre take. Have you gone through the peer review process for a scientific paper? I have, and fairly reliably I’ve had experts in the field review the content and provide strong, thoughtful feedback. Maybe your particular subject field is more prone to politicking than mine? It’s hard for me to think of peer review as anything other than absolutely essential.

Does it? Someone should do a study and...huh wait a minute.

That's quite a claim to make, and impossible to falsify in the universe it posits.