Amen for #2! It's like the entire field of biology is an endless quest for low p-values, regardless if the hypothesis is even interesting. It's like people are not interested to think, they just want to publish something significantly differnt.
I much prefer how machine learning folks tend to approach predictive accuracy, though I guess that's not quite the same as understanding relationships between specific variables while controlling for others.
What's going on in the academia is a classical example of perverse incentives. If your career depends on churning out soul-crushingly bad or insignificant papers that fulfill some superficial criteria of "scienceness" then that's what you'll do. It's dangerously close to cargo cult science.