1. Publication venues aren’t created equal. People outside of academia don’t understand that anyone can and will start a journal/conference. If I want to launch the Proceedings of the of Confabulatory Results in Computer Science Conference, all I need is a cheap hosting account and I’m ready to go. In countries like the US this is explicitly protected speech, and the big for-profit sites run by Elsevier et al. will often go ahead and add my publications to their database as long as I make enough of an effort to make things look legitimate.
In any given field there are probably a handful of “top” venues that everyone in the field knows, and a vast long tail ranging from mid-tier to absolute fantasist for-profit crap. If you focus on the known conferences you might see bad results, but if you focus on the long tail you’re doing the equivalent of searching the 50th+ page of Google results for some term: that is, you’re deliberately selecting for SEO crap. And given the relatively high cost of peer-reviewing the good vs not peer-reviewing the bad, unfiltered searches will always be dominated by crap (surely this is a named “law”?) Within TFA I cannot tell if the author is filtering properly for decent venues (as any self-respecting expert would do) or if they’re just complaining about spam. Some mention is made of a DARPA project, so I’m hopeful it’s not too bad. However even small filtering errors will instantly make your results meaningless.
2. Citations aren’t intended as a goddamn endorsement (or metric). In science we cite papers liberally. We do not do this because we want people to get a cookie. We don’t do it because we’re endorsing every result. We do it because we’ve learned (or been told) about a possibly relevant result and we want the reader to know about it too. When it comes to citations, more is usually better. Just as it is much better to let many innocent people go free rather than imprison one guilty one, it is vastly better to cite a hundred mediocre or incorrect papers than to miss one important citation. Readers should not see a citation and infer correctness or importance unless the author specifically states this in the text at which point, sure, that’s an error. But most citation-counting metrics don’t actually read the citing papers, they just do text matching. Since most bulk citations are just reading lists, this also filters for citations that don’t mean much about the quality of a work.
The idea of using citation counts as a metric for research quality is a bad one that administrators (and the type of researchers who solve administrative problems) came up with. It is one of those “worst ideas except for any other” solutions: probably better than throwing darts at a board and certainly more scalable than reading every paper for quality. But the idea is artificial at best, and complaints like “why are people citing incorrect results” fundamentally ask citations to be something they're not.
Overall there are many legitimate complaints about academia and replicability to be had out there. But salting them with potential nonsense does nobody any favors, and just makes the process of fixing these issues much less likely to succeed.