I'm not very surprised. If you've ever reviewed papers for an academic conference, you'll find that the vast majority of them are just very bad. The average ACM conference has a ~20% or so acceptance rate - and the remaining 80% isn't just a hair away from being accepted. For a big chunk of it, it's just garbage.

Ill defined research problems, vague statements, poor methodology, many grammatical mistakes... given the nature of peer review, it's only natural that people who author nonsensical papers would nod at nonsensical reviews.

For people saying that this is because academia is an old boys network: not quite so. While it can definitely be like that when you get to the top, the vast majority of peer reviewers for most conferences are just grad students, post docs, or junior researchers who don't really discriminate by trying to guess who wrote the paper.