I think the cost and complexity of reproducing work is somewhat overestimated, as is the specific expertise of individual researchers, though maybe your field is exceptional in this regard.
Primary research, pioneering new techniques and equipment to explore the unknown, is time-consuming and costly and requires a lot of original thought and repeated failure until success is achieved. However, reproducing that work doesn't involve much of this. It's taking the developed methodology and repeating the original work. That may well involve expensive equipment and materials, and developing the technical expertise to use them, but that does not involve doing everything from scratch and should not take anything like as long or cost as much.
I also believe that we far too readily overestimate the specific special skills which PhD students and postdoctoral researchers possess. Their knowledge and skills could likely be transferred to others in fairly short order. This is done in industry routinely. A PhD student is learning to research from scratch; very little of their expertise will actually be unique, and the small bit that is unique is unlikely to be difficult for others to pick up. I know we don't like to think of researchers as replaceable cogs, but for the most part they are.
My background is life sciences, and some papers comprise years of work, particularly those involving clinical studies. However, the vast majority of research techniques are shared between labs, and most analytical equipment is off the shelf from vendors, even the very expensive stuff. Custom fabrication is common--we had our own workshop for custom mechanical and electronic parts--but most of that could have been handled by any contract fabricator given the drawings. And the really expensive equipment is often a shared departmental or institutional resource. Most of the work undertaken by most of the biological and medical research labs worldwide could be easily replicated by one of the others given the resources.
Depending upon the specific field, there are contract research organisations worldwide which could pick up a lot of this type of work. For life sciences, there are hundreds of CROs which could do this.
As one small bit of perspective. In my lab a PhD student worked on a problem (without success) for over a year. We gave it to a CRO and they had it done in a week. For less than £1000. The world is full of specialists who are extremely competent at doing work for other people, and they are often far more technically competent and efficient than academic researchers.