>You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.

Why don't we fire researchers who committed fraud or who are incompetent?

Some studies will fail replication, even though the researchers did everything right. But in many cases the methodology is flawed, statistics are misused or the data is massages. In industry this would be grounds of termination and this isn't even the outright fraud, which also happens. For most of these no serious punishment is expected.

That flame retardant bit was bad research, they misplaced the decimal point and concluded that the contamination could reach the safety limit. And it wasn't like they put it there deliberately, that was the result of recycling stuff that can't be heated to the point of burning off impurities.