My general experience as a PhD student makes me feel that we probably should look at the system as a whole. I get the feeling most universities are abusing publications as a way of assessing their own students. It means people will tend to publish slop for the sake of publication instead of genuinely tackling hard problems. I personally have seen my university get away with forming defence committees with 0 knowledge of the field they're assessing. If the university can't assess its students work then they should not be teaching.

I think both conferences and journals are broken in this regard. It doesn't help that professors primary jobs these days is to be a social media influencer and attract funding. How the funding is used doesn't seem to matter or impact their careers. What we need is more accountability from senior researchers. They should be at the very least assessing their own students work before stamping their name on the work.

On the flip side it isn't untrue that there are major breakthroughs happening daily at this point in many fields. We just don't have the bandwidth to handle all the information overload.