Rigorous peer review, let alone paid (which causes its own issues beyond money), is totally infeasible with the current publication pressure. It's hard to find reviewers even with the current lax criteria of both reviewers and quality of their review (the latter is more problematic).

The publication volume is just way way way too high. But researchers who don't publish multiple articles per year, regardless if you have anything of value to publish, perish. If you don't churn out paper-per-year in your PhD, you don't get the PhD.

Much of the manuscripts that get submitted to journals are incredibly bad. Most are just bad. But as both editor and reviewer, I usually let them be published out of pity if the stuff isn't blatantly wrong; the poor PhD student's whole career is on the line.

Journals being full of crap is not SO bad within science because everybody knows they are full of crap. But if an "outsider" thinks that being published in a peer-reviewed journal, even a "good" journal, means that the article isn't crap, it can be literally life-or-death (like in this case).

Academia is broken because it's being run as a business whose purpose is to churn out papers. Welcome to neoliberalism.