I don't know which field you studied, but I think that in physics it's not quite that bad. There might be some research published that's just wrong or fraudulent, but not that much. I think it's because in physics, outside maybe high energy particle physics, it's usually feasible to check other people's experiments. In theoretical physics it's certainly common to work through other people's results before extending them.

However, I would say there's a lot of pointless research. Lots of graduate student and postdoc working hours are spent to produce results that no-one could possibly think are interesting or useful just because papers need to be produced.

I think it's the reduction of the system into a career mill (PhD for students, tenure for postdocs and grant money for professors) that ruins it. Science is inherently too unpredictable to be reduced into an algorithm that just about anyone can use to produce knowledge.