(For those reading along: the_duke is talking about the project I'm involved with,
https://plaudit.pub .)
I think you're right about the root cause; that's why Plaudit's endorsement data is free and open data, publicly available through CrossRef. Citations indeed are a similar implicit voting system, but they have the "problem" that they only accumulate over a larger time scale: an article first has to undergo peer review, then get published, then get read, then get used, and then people using it also need to get their results reviewed and published. We're talking several years here.
That's why evaluators often use the journal name/Impact Factor as a proxy for "expected number of citations". With Plaudit, research can start accumulating endorsements from the moment the preprint is published, so it could serve a similar role.
(And since Plaudit endorsements judge impact and robustness separately, articles and the journals that publish them can also get recognition for "boring" research - which is not possible using the Impact Factor.
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Luckily, there are also plenty of initiatives for alternative public peer review systems. Additionally, there are also tons of "blockchain for science" projects (caveat: most appear to consist of a single whitepaper), although it's not clear to me what science-specific problem the decentralisation solves.
If you'd like some pointers to some specific such projects, let me know.