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The find one or more well-credentialed and cited experts in the field to anonymously review the paper and point out shortcomings in the research or drafting - this is the 'peer' part of peer review. Then they either accept for publication, suggest revisions, or reject it outright.

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Note that the peer reviewers doing the work are unpaid volunteers, the people receiving the money are just middlemen.

I've heard this definitely more than I like, but is there evidence that this is true ?

Just go on academic twitter and ask, you will get a torrent of sob stories. Everyone hates the journal industry but nobody knows how to overturn it. Every so often a group in some field bands together and gets a new open-access journal going (good) but then that has to run for several years and feature heavyweight papers before it can compete with the incumbent, and it's a lot of work while making much less money.

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