You might enjoy this conversation, which goes into why we get so many papers like this: https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-peer-review-and-the-academ

You might enjoy this conversation, which goes into why we get so many papers like this: https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-peer-review-and-the-academic-kitchen/ https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-peer-review-and... TLDR; the incentives are all aligned for researchers to do very narrow, marginal work.