> There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.

Yes, but the point is not that the good journals are not there, it’s that the good ones are drowned out by the absolute humongous amount of garbage that comes out every day. If you do research you know that it’s not so simple like “oh I only read papers from journals X and Y”. Good research comes out everywhere, and if you don’t cite it people (I mean reviewers, if you can call them that) will complain, and anyway you’ll be putting yourself in a bubble which is bad practice. It used to be that journals would do the work for you to separate good from bad research, but nowadays it’s on the researcher to dig through 1000 papers to find a single good one. It’s ridiculous and meaningless. If we’re paying them and making them rich, at least I’d expect them to do their job.