Administrative track is an established part of the academia. Many professors choose it for a variety of reasons, including interests, ambitions, and a diminished ability to contribute to research. Those people have a background in research, but they are administrators, not active researchers.
Science consists of many niches – many fields and subfields – each of which has its own norms and practices. People with limited exposure to the breadth of scientific research often assume that other fields are similar to the fields they are familiar with. The generalizations I mentioned in my last paragraph were examples of that.
Focusing on "the system" is an example of administrative thinking. It's the idea that science is a uniform centralized machine, where the administrators on top make the strategic choices and the people in the field execute them. Actual science is an unholy mess of people, formal and informal organizations, and connections between them. It works in a thousand different ways. Attempts to impose uniformity often make it worse, until people find ways to work around the system.
The system cannot be fixed, because each field works in different ways. Attempts to change it typically make it better for some fields and worse for some others. Instead of a single system, you need a thousand different systems. Instead of trying to fix science, you should ask more specific questions, such as how to make algorithm engineering, algorithmic bioinformatics or human pangenomics better.
Those are some of the niches I'm familiar with. I don't find anything particularly wrong with the formal publication system in those subfields, because it's only a small sliver of the communication. In addition to papers, we also have preprints, emails, blogs, Slacks, Zoom calls, GitHub, Twitter/Bluesky, conferences, workshops, summer schools, hackathons, and so on. People communicate in various ways, and they have always been doing that. Sure things could be better, but they could also be a lot worse. The actual issues are in the hard administrative constraints, such as funding, jobs, and visas.