In the publishing world, there is this thing called the slush pile: the collection of unsolicited submissions, essentially the only way a person without an agent can break into the field. And you can find quite a few editors' experiences with the slush pile in various blog posts or articles online. And the general reaction goes from naïve wonder at the idea of finding the diamond-in-the-rough to frustration with the quality of the submissions and a realization that the actual game is to figure out how to reject submissions with as little reading as possible (because they don't have the time to do any reading!). This is before LLMs came about, which have made the slush pile problem much worse because they don't improve the quality of the submissions but the increase the amount of reading that needs to be done to reject them.

Academia has the same fundamental problem. We don't actually have the time to read every possible paper someone has for us, because keeping up with literature takes time that we don't have. And while relying on the quality of the journal or conference as a metric for "is this paper worth reading?" has issues, to be honest, it is more effective than other proposed solutions. When I have done the literature searches that delved into the unknown, low-quality tiers of journals... no, those results were not worth the time I spent reading them.