The effort required to reproduce a result, especially an exotic one, is often prohibitive. The reward for successful reproduction is near zero, and if you fail,

The effort required to reproduce a result, especially an exotic one, is often prohibitive. The reward for successful reproduction is near zero, and if you fail, it’s often absolutely zero - you are not going to be able to contest a result by a failure. The original authors can simply say that your reproduction was flawed, if they need to answer at all. A journal that requires five confirmations to cite a work is a journal that will fast have zero submissions. The main reason people attempt reproduction is to continue that line of research, and that often starts with reproduction plus a slight tweak. This is why you find a lot of papers like this. This is also how irreproducible results become sort of known about but not challenged in many fields.