I am assuming that you are doing computers science, and in the current environment focusing on the conceptual contribution and do the minimal amount of engineering is solid advice.

I started in physics and there someone could make a great career corroborating for or disproving conceptual contributions. This is not a track in CS and is practically career suicide.

From experience most CS research can not be trusted to be correct, and enabling people to build a career on replicating or corroborating studies would in my opinion be of great value. Even the research that is correct is often not fully implemented so you not only have to implement their approach, you also have to discover how to realize it. That work is not publishable in CS, and it is a non-trivial amount of extremely risky work.