Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. Each paper will need to be judged on its own merits, irrespective of the source.
I suspect there will be citations galore shortly, faster than anyone can think.
Good judgement takes time, but if the time to judge exceeds the time to spam -- and it does, by many orders of magnitude -- then we should expect the approach "judge each work by its merits" to result in being overwhelmed by spam, which we already are. Reputations let you amortize the cost of acceptance and reduce the cost of rejection, giving you a fighting chance against spam that extreme open-mindedness does not.