i find peer-review to be much worse. Check out PubPeer.com if you want to see the horrors of what makes its way into the scientific literature. Most of the stuff there is biotech related so it can be handy for deep diving into sketchy biotech companies.
My personal experience w the peer-review process is that it is only as valuable as an author wants it to be. A good author seeks out rigorous peer-review. A sketchy author usually manages to find equally sketchy peer-reviewers or journals that tend to use sketchy peer-reviewers.
However, even ‘notable’ authors from prestigious institutions still manage to get sketchy stuff published. There are several Nobel Prize winners and profs from Harvard, MIT, CalTech etc that have been outed for fraudulent papers. Frequently grad students & postdocs get thrown under the bus but the point is that the sketchy stuff makes it thru solely cuz of the trailing name on the author list. There have have been a couple cases where investigators have tested the process by submitting gibberish to journals and the stuff has been accepted for publication.
A more recent problem, particularly w authors from the PRC, is the Paper Mill. Those are professional scientific paper production enterprises. Until recently this practice was unintentionally incentivized by the central government. An author pays according to journal, language, impact factor etc and the mill churns out a paper - usually entirely fraudulent. On a good day, they may actually use real data but the data and the subject and conclusion are not necessarily related.
I am personally familiar with a scientist who has been publishing falsified science for at least a decade (not in the Karl Popper sense). He’s somewhat prolific. He uses real numerical data but what he attaches the numbers to is the falsified part. His work is peer-reviewed both prior to journal submission and by the journals. Nobody managed to catch him until I came along. The institution won’t fire him or retract the articles cuz liability (eg paying back many $millions and risking suspension/termination of a multi-$billion project).
Democracy is much better at self-correcting than science. You don’t hear about science fraud cuz institutions tend to be complicit in hiding fraud. In fact, in the case cited above, one of the management excuses is: “the work made it thru peer-review” so it’s ok.
