Not the person you replied to, but... Everything is extremely hype-driven -- it turns out that "cannot confirm X" isn't very compelling for journals, etc. etc.

Not the person you replied to, but... Everything is extremely hype-driven -- it turns out that "cannot confirm X" isn't very compelling for journals, etc. etc. or even the news cycle. Journals, etc. thrive on exciting new findings... and that tends to lessen the critical looks. Of course, there are lots of other things to this problem: Very narrow fields where people absolutely know who their "anonymous" paper reviewers will be, and so must include even extremely tangential references to those reviewers' papers, etc. etc. Usually the sciences self-correct eventually[0], but that's only because there is such a thing as objectively verifiable facts and overwhelming statistics in science. [0] Unfortunately often as slowly as "one funeral at a time" (Max Planck, I think).