The system is quite broken, one could say that in its present state, it almost discourages genuine novelty of thought.

But, it’s imperfect, first and foremost, because the people involved are imperfect. Reviewing is often a job assigned to the lowest performers in research groups, or traded by the highest performers (constantly on-big tech internships, building startups/open source models on the side) with their colleagues that have a somewhat more laid-back attitude to research excellence. You can submit a bad review and it will not come back to bite you, but in the age of reproducibility, a messed-up experiment or a poorly written/plainly incorrect paper that slips through the review system could be your end.

The idea is that you enter the publishing game at the beginning of your PhD and emerge seeing through and being above the game once you’ve graduated. After all, you first have to master the rules of the game to be able to propose meaningful changes. It is just that once done, you might have a lot more incentives to switch to industry/consultancy and not care about the paper-citation game ever again.