Massive misundertanding here:

Science doesn't work by noble individuals scrupulously following rules that they could ignore if they chose to.

Where science works, it works by incentivising one scientist to tear apart the next scientist's position. There's no better way to avoid having your argument torn apart than for it to be genuinely solid.

This is aptly demonstrated by Nature tearing into Elsevier...

The time to get really worried is when you stop hearing anything like this and get a message only of, 'Everything is fine, nothing to see here'.