Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those published by any named journal.
Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing career/department suicide by allowing this to happen.
Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from the trenches until this situation changes.
I'll both agree and disagree. Starting with disagree:
A lot of these problems arose mostly in the last 20 years, and is somewhat dependent on the discipline. To give you an idea, someone getting an engineering PhD with, say, 3-5 papers published in peer reviewed (but average) journals had a good chance of getting a tenure track job as late as, say, 2005 - without doing any postdocs - no concerns about impact factors, etc. Most advisors were not slave drivers. Now if you switch to something like biology or physics, then it was much less likely and you needed a post doc. Still, if you went back another 20 years, you'd likely get a tenure track job straight out of a physics PhD.
For publishing, most academics never cared until the last 10 years or so. The cost of journals to universities did not explode until some point in the 2000's - so even less prestigious universities would subscribe to most journals an academic needed.
Once you got through tenure, it's hard to describe how you're treated as "shitty". You choose your hours. You choose if you want to get paid for summer or not. You choose what you want to work on. The pay is low, but it somewhat tracks that of industry (i.e. engineering professors still get paid more than humanities, etc). Having all that freedom should cost you in terms of pay. And just like in the real world, you can always get paid more if you do pretty good work in things that others care about (i.e. sacrifice your freedom somewhat).
Where I agree with you: In my experience, any group that insulates itself from the outside and uses only in-group metrics will eventually reach the stage they are in. If only they get to decide what makes one academic better than another, then you will get pettiness.
Nobody takes an academic job for the money.