Peer review is not an important part of the scientific method actually. It's not even necessary. There was no peer review for most of what we now take for grant

Peer review is not an important part of the scientific method actually. It's not even necessary. There was no peer review for most of what we now take for granted in science. The Journal Nature did not make peer review standard until 1973. Science is about making reality the arbiter of truth. What is true is what you can demonstrate in an experiment pretty much anywhere. Science is self-correcting not because other scientists take a look at your work before it gets published, but because a theory that is not backed up by reality will be harder to build on, make worse predictions, and generally not be useful for actual work. It doesn't matter how much "hype" built up around LK-99 for example, because you could not build anything out of it, because it didn't work as claimed, and no amount of belief can overcome that. Science is self correcting because the universe is not convinced by rhetoric, and will only ever follow it's own rules. Tellingly, scientists who have been around for a while do not consider a published paper as especially meaningful. They do not consider peer review as vouching for a paper's correctness. They have seen hundreds of papers pass peer review and make it into Science and Nature and turn out to be bunk. No scientific process will be perfect, so some amount of papers should be expected to be wrong, no matter how genuinely careful and perfect the scientists who wrote it were. It's really sad how over-indexed the lay-public has gotten on peer review. It's just not how science works. It can still be somewhat useful for more popular journals who have to pick and choose what to publish anyway, but it's only useful if the peer reviewers are themselves domain experts in a rigorous and formalized scientific discipline.