My assessment is that it is because the science itself has devolved quite a bit. I'm just a greybeard sysadmin type who happened to be taught by a world-class g

My assessment is that it is because the science itself has devolved quite a bit. I'm just a greybeard sysadmin type who happened to be taught by a world-class geneticist how to read papers and turn them into implemented solutions, (I managed the data flow of every major sequencer type, we had at least one of each) during the sequencing boom in 2013. So that is the caveat to take my non-phd view with a grain of salt, but: He showed me how researchers were padding their publication resumes in various ways, often with really bad research, which we considered anything that wasn't reproducible. The journals have too much corruption and money sloshing around and are no longer a very good indicator, and one really has to do the work of meta-analysis themselves was my takeaway. The number one indicator to me of this for a researcher is when they talk about how many times they've been published, one of the metrics that they pad the most. Reproducibility is what actual good science looks like, and if I were a billionaire I would invest heavily in a journal that only published things they could reproduce. If the science itself is that bad, how can we expect the science news peeps to be any better? Upstream cause-and-effect.