In reality a lot of them publish priors dressed up to look like evidence. As an example see Flaxman2020. It's best to model journals as magazines that publish

In reality a lot of them publish priors dressed up to look like evidence. As an example see Flaxman2020. It's best to model journals as magazines that publish anything that vaguely resembles science (has equations, charts, citations, claims of data). It doesn't have to actually be science. If you want to get a paper published it's totally normal to write 10,000 lines of C or FORTRAN, claim it models some natural process, publish a paper with the graphs it outputs and call it a day. The code isn't available. The input data isn't available. The assumptions aren't documented properly or at all. And the outputs are unvalidated, therefore not even laying the foundations of being evidence of anything. Doesn't matter, it'll get published, in some fields this is the vast majority of what gets published (e.g. epidemiology).