The problem here is that the journals do not provide proper review. Perhaps it's a presumption of honesty/integeity, but they need to start asking if the experiment was plausible. If it would have been expensive, who funded it, etc...
The problem is that there are too many scientists chasing too few dollars- something's gotta give, and on the extreme side of things you end up getting fraud / faked data. This could be mitigated by open science practices and reforms to the review process to some extent, but these only address a symptom and not the root cause.
The primary solutions I can see (not necessarily mutually exclusive) are to a) reduce the costs of research equipment and staff substantially so that competition for funding becomes less relevant, b) provide a larger pot of state-sponsored scientific funding (industrial science tends to favor refining research more than performing tentative research so corporate funding would be an ill-advised solution), or c) to discourage young budding potential grad students from even going into the grad school track in the first place.
As an individual, option c) is something that I personally feel like I can make a difference with. Professors in undergrad can be really terrible about conveying the exact career options you can have in science without necessarily going for the PhD. Invisible support positions like HPC system administrators, research software engineers, and even to some extent hospital lab workers don't require hefty commitments to grad school but still allow one to live within the world of scientific discourse and contribute to the advancement of various fields as an enabler (perhaps less so for hospital workers). Unfortunately, the invisibility of these professions is a major problem, which is why there are organizations like UKRSE [0] that strive to generate more recognition for at least Research Software Engineering (curiously Google in the States seems to have been quick to recognize scientific programmers as distinct professionals relative to PhDs and other programmers, while academia in the US has not done so nearly as much). Also, for some support positions in IT there are non-science options that are much more lucrative.
Since the whole scientific research machine needs a large number of PhD students and postdocs to perform research cheaply I don't see fixing c) until we solve the funding issue, since the reliance on cheap student/postdoc labor is partly a symptom of lack of funding.
Another point is that professors are very biased in that they successfully completed grad school, probably a postdoc if they are relatively new and then got a tenure track job. They then suggest that you follow a similar track, strong confirmation bias since you see their success and not the "failure" of the 90% who couldn't/didn't find jobs in academia.
Even having won the Tenure-Track Lotto, I don't do this.
Generally speaking, a student telling me they want a Ph.D in my field gets a strong warning and a frank discussion about the nature of the job market. I'm willing to support them if they simply cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives, but the pool of students for whom getting a Ph.D is actually a good idea is a very small pool indeed.
As do I - it's helpful to point out to students that at steady state, the replacement rate for a tenured professor is one. If the field is doubling in size over their lifetime...it's two.
But I'm also in a field where "alternative" careers don't carry quite the same stigma.
Also one thing that surprised me is that peer reviews are not made blind to the reviewer.
Some things will always be made obvious specially if it's a small field and you know who is doing what.
But if you are reviewer and the 'very famous and respectable' colleague is co-authoring the paper you are reviewig, you are much more likely to dismiss any unclear or incorrect aspects of the paper.
It would seem like a really simple step to just redact any aspects of the paper that would give away names, locations, etc.
This is very field-dependent. In mine (political science) it's routine to blind the reviews in both directions. In others, papers are reviewed with the author's name and affiliation on the top.
There is a further issue that if you're in a small-enough (sub-)field you probably know what other people are working on and can effectively unblind the authors anyway.
On a large scale, assuming people are being honest is probably more functional and beneficial. The flow of research, in particular medical, seemed already covered with speed-bumps as it is.
And the fact that the fraud has been found out, even if a delay is involved, pleads in favour of the system.
It's sad that science has come to this.