Second order science working as intended.

Science historically works on the time scale of decades and centuries, not months and years imo. So I think it's working faster and better than ever before. Journals are not science, just a small tool for slightly better communication between scientists. I think/hope we'll make them obsolete in favor of something that looks more like git repos with lots of automated analysis of logic and tests etc eventually.

Peer review is a modern invention, so benchmarking whether or not science is working based on peer review is a bizarre notion. What we're seeing is indeed old-school science working as it always has.

Why are you conflating peer review with science?

Peer review is a relatively modern invention.

A vast majority of important 20th century physics, for example was pre-peer review.

Journals aren't intended to be pefect and only filled with papers that are never disputed or exposed as wrong.

There are ways of estimating percentages of bad papers, just as there are ways of estimating subsets of other populations.

This is science working as intended - the good reproducable work advances on the strength of the good papers and the bad papers fall away from lack of follow on.