If we're talking about weird incentives and academia you hit on one of the worst ones right here, I think, since nothing there is very closely connected to helping students learn.
I know that's a dead horse, but it's VERY easy to find reasons that we shouldn't be too closely attached to the status quo.
> For every lab doing new work, you’d basically need a clone of that lab to replicate their work.
Hell, that's how startup funding works, or market economies in general. Top-down, non-redundant systems are way more fragile than distributed ecosystems. If you don't have the competition and the complete disconnection, you so much more easily fall into political games of "how do we get this published even if it ain't great" vs "how do we find shit that will survive the competition"
A Ph.D would be expected to perform some replication research as part of their package.
Finally, we would start with the fields that are easy to replicate and move up. We couldn't replicate CERN if we tried. But we could implement this in psychology tomorrow, for example.
First, people that want to be professors normally do so because they want to steer their research agenda, not repeat what other people are doing without contribution. Second, who works in their lab? Most of the people doing the leg work in a lab are PhD students, and, to graduate, they need to do something novel to write up in their dissertation. Thus, they can’t just replicate three experiments and get a doctorate. Third, you underestimate how specialized lab groups are — both in terms of the incredibly expensive equipment it is equipped with and the expertise within the lab. Even folks in the same subfield (or even in the same research group!) often don’t have much in common when it comes to interests, experience, and practical skills.
For every lab doing new work, you’d basically need a clone of that lab to replicate their work.