I'm not sure how much my cynicism is just me or my immediate experiences over the years, but I don't really trust the academic system anymore in terms of credit

I'm not sure how much my cynicism is just me or my immediate experiences over the years, but I don't really trust the academic system anymore in terms of credit or even as much in terms of validity. Or rather I do, but in some abstract sense, in that if I see a meta-analysis with some mechanism of dealing with publication bias (formal modeling of bias, or preregistration) I might believe something, but I don't attach any credit to the body of work beyond those who as a group in toto were involved in it. Too much credit is given to trappings of progress or something of that sort; conversely, people are punished too much for things that are irrelevant, and both seem to be weighted capriciously. I see similar viewpoints expressed repeatedly in various outlets, but little seems to change.