Of course it seems strange. The output of the scientific/academic community is often presented to people as being a source of truth and scientists do little to dissuade this. To learn that it's all rotten to the core is upsetting.
What I try to do when reading academic papers is, if there are multiple on the same topic, read them and try to understand the differences. If different papers come to the same conclusion, that should make you a lot more confident in the result. If there aren't many papers on the subject then you just need to understand that this is kind of a "best effort" thing that is more likely to be true than a random guess, but not certainly accurate.
Different labs also do different things - mine is currently reworking a paper that was basically done because something we did might matter, and my students have developing tests as part of their workload for developing code.
Unfortunately, you can't build a career out of doing QA for science. Nobody will fund you.
It's all about trust, really. Many people choose to trust state-of-the-art medical research when they do vaccinations on their kids; some do not. You can indeed choose not to trust us as a 'source of truth', and it seems a fair chunk of the US political landscape is being led down that path; we'll see where it goes.
I think you're making it to be a bigger deal than it actually is. Most of these things are just noise. We just ignore it. If someone rises to prominence with outrageously fake results, rest assured that they will get shot down quickly by concurrents (all the incentive to publish fake results lies within highly competitive fields). If you know what you're doing, and work in a lab where people know what they're doing too, you can still do pretty good science. I would guess than in all communities, academic or not, there's a nonzero amount of bogus, over-hype, nepotism, politics and what not, and a subset of people who actually get things done and make the whole field advance. After a while, the test of time truly determines what was actually useful from what is bunk. That's how it's always been.
And believe me I hate being defeatist, it made me a lot angrier when I was younger and I consider it to be one of the things that stopped me trying to go down the academic route so far.
While coders (who aren't just being boosters for particular technologies) have to live with the fact that the world is run on mountains of bad code, scientists of anyone engaging with academia or journal papers has to sleep at night realising how much bad science is being done and how much the publication process is skewed to publishing and politics over quality or fact checking.
I can no more fix it than I can fix all software bugs or politics in big corporations...
The core principles of science are in conflict with natural human behavior (which is one reason it took so long to invent science), so saying “they’re only human” is really no excuse.