> higher-profile journals in general have more retractions and research misconduct [1-2]

Given that reviews are not a mechanism to check for truth but soundness, the higher profile the thing I would imagine there would be more misconduct. I mean would one risk prison to steal 10$ or to steal 1 million $?

> lower research quality [3]

To cite exactly from your link "the evidence is mixed about whether they are strongly correlated with indicators of research quality.". I find saying "lower" a bit too strong given the original quote.

> in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4]

For a specific field "cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published recently"!

> statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]

According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti... they kind of targeted bio/medical/psychology field for the analysis. Which seems to me very focused to be able to draw general conclusions.

> Also, making it through peer review is highly random and dependent on who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just basically a coin toss even when looking at reviewer groups:

It's a coin toss if paper could get accepted at all, and that's less than ideal but what the system should do (at least) is reject obvious crap, not ensure that something gets clearly accepted. The danger is False Positive (accepted even if it's crap) rather than False Negative (rejected even if it might be something useful).

Overall note: the review system is not ideal and should be improved. But it's a hard, complex and delicate problem.

Oh, I agree this is all super complex and delicate. If I had more time, I'd love to write a more nuanced, many-thousands-of-words blog post going into which journals and fields actually have good peer review and can be more / less trusted.

I just wanted to make a strong rhetorical case by highlighting some things that might be surprising to people making more naive defenses of journals via peer-review-based arguments.