Let me understand this: you found an error in a paper published in 1998, over 24 years ago. Based on this finding you were able to publish a critique and partial solution in a more recent conference or journal, which seems like an absolutely first-class scientific outcome. (I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.) And yet despite this reasonably good outcome correcting an ancient and apparently little-studied result, you feel that this error indicts the entire field of scientific research… because people have cited the paper?? (Most likely, given the number of citations, without relying on the model and simply listing it in “previous work” sections.)

You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [initially I read their Google scholar as indicating they’d left the field, but they haven’t and that was my mistake reading Google Scholar in Korean.] Meanwhile you have not contacted the third (typically senior and advisory) author, who appears to have publications as of 2022?

Yet even if you do the basic legwork here and contact all the authors, I’m not sure quite what result you want from this? I presume you’d like an acknowledgement that an old paper has errors? You’ve already received that through the acceptance of your own paper. Would an admission by the third author help? Do you demand a retraction of that ancient paper and every single paper that cited it since? And how is this the devastating critique of all science that you seem to think it is?

I'm not sure we're having a productive conversation. Perhaps I've been unclear, but I didn't say this was a "devastating critique of all science". I said that I thought my field was "for the most part [...] okay" and I think that's true for science broadly. My main point is that peer review as currently practiced is not as good at quality control as you seem to believe.

My link was just one example. As I indicated, I don't have time to give more examples, and I didn't expect to convince you. I think few academics are actively looking for errors, so unless you are, you may not notice them as often as I have.

> I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.

There are quite a few papers that directly use the criticized model, from the 90s until recently. It does seem that many people blindly accepted a clearly wrong model. With that being said, the other model in the paper is responsible for most of the citations.

> You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [...] I’m not sure quite what result you want from this?

The first author is the senior author here. (The conference paper version does not have the other two authors.) I contacted them because if I'm wrong, I wanted them to tell me how so that I could avoid making a fool of myself in my paper. I don't want their paper to be retracted, though a notice that it has severe errors would be helpful to readers.