All three points you mentioned are true for large parts of physics research. The point is: Not so for LIGO. The data is open, the code is open. They even had J

All three points you mentioned are true for large parts of physics research. The point is: Not so for LIGO. The data is open, the code is open. They even had Jupiter notebooks doing the later parts of the analysis when they published the first detection. And, one cannot overstate that while the black hole mergers might have been bogus for some reason, the neutron star merger as been observed by over 80 different experiments in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.