Let us be a little bit fair to the researchers who adopted the p=.001 or p=.0001 uncorrected approaches. Their approach wasn't completely unreasoned, and was even justifiable at one time given available methods.

There were mainly two approaches to multiple comparison corrections: Bonferroni and setting an uncorrected threshold. People here might say, well yeah, use Bonferroni.

However, Bonferroni is really only appropriate when comparisons are independent. Voxels (3D pixels) which are adjacent are highly dependent, and indeed the brain is generally correlated. This dependency makes Bonferrnoi correction (very) inappropriately conservative. Given the average dependence of voxels, some researchers estimated that the average number of true comparisons might be on the order of hundreds to a few thousand. In practice, researchers corrected with Bonferroni, either found a really strong effect, or reset using uncorrected threshold. Some reported results using both. People who read the results interpreted results that way too. Bonferroni = reliable, uncorrected = provisional

The contribution of the salmon study and other research papers is that they truly demonstrated that the typical uncorrected thresholds in use were insufficient to control false positives.