"Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.
Only knowledge that originates in academia, and even then only a portion of it.
> because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory.
While this may be generally true, it is not absolutely true.
> "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science...
Partially non-quantitative.
Also: it'a (partially) true, but so what?
> ...and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.
Right: one is known to be important, and the others are (at this point in time) hoped to be important (as they have been in the past).
Einstein was only subject to it once and didn't pass. Newton, Galileo and the rest were not subject to it at all.
Newton and others all published and then discussed the details in person, a lot of the peer review was "off-paper" and "post-publication".
Also, the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs, by count, occurred after peer review- mainly due to the unbelievable pace of breakthroughs due to technological advancement.
According to this [1], Einstein's paper that didn't pass peer review turned out to be wrong (it said gravitational waves didn't exist), and was later published elsewhere with different conclusions and fixing problems that the referee's report had already pointed out.
> The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee’s report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty.
[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822