Papers are absolutely judged on impact - it's not as though any paper submitted to Nature gets published as long as it gets through peer review. Most journals (especially high-impact for-profit journals) have editors that are selecting interesting and important papers. I think it's probably a good idea to separate those two jobs ("is this work rigorous and clearly documented") vs ("should this be included in the fall 2023 issue").

That's (probably) good for getting the most important papers to the top, but it also strongly disincentivizes whole categories (often very important paper). Two obvious categories are replication studies and negative results. "I tried it too and it worked for me" "I tried it too and it didn't work" "I tried this cool thing and it had absolutely no effect on how lasers work" could be the result of tons of very hard work and could have really important implications, but you're not likely to make a big splash in high-impact journals with work like that. A well-written negative result can prevent lots of other folks from wasting their own time (and you already spent your time on it so might as well write it up).

The pressure for impactful work also probably contributes to folks juicing the stats or faking results to make their results more exciting (other things certainly contribute to this too like funding and tenure structures). I don't think "don't care about impact" is a solution to the problem because obviously we want the papers that make cool new stuff.