A fake photo plus a valid barcode will pass any current check right? Unless you still do a secondary proprietary photo lookup that I don’t think exists.
Cryptographic NFC chips are basically free these days, and any modern smartphone can read them. The photo issue is solved by having the chip contain a copy of the photo, as a few extra kilobytes of data isn't an issue when you aren't using barcodes. The copy issue is solved by having the chip sign a verifier-provided nonce together with the data, and having the government sign the chip's public key instead.
Having the photo there just encourages sloppy ID checks by human eye, and it's much easier to mislead the human eye than it is to forge an NFC chip.
If the photo was in the chip only, we'd force ID verifiers to do their job properly, and make forgeries structurally impossible. With basically everybody having an NFC-enabled phone now, you wouldn't even need people to get extra hardware for this.
But if you need to be ID checked entering a club or just buying a beer… they’re not training for that, and they’re not buying the hardware to handle it automatically either. Looking at a photo is an appropriate level of security for that purpose.