What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").
But much more importantly, the flaw in your mental model is thinking that claims in published papers are expected to be correct. They aren't. The goal of a paper is to advance the field by stimulating discussion and new research. The unfortunate consequence of this is that laypersons can't directly use research papers as an authoritative source describing our current understanding of a subject.
The github analogy still holds up. Non-programmers shouldn't be downloading code off github, compiling and running it because they have no way of evaluating whether the code really does what it claims to do. They're probably better off getting applications from curated app stores. Accessible scientific publications written by recognized experts in the field are the equivalent of curated app stores. That is where laypersons should be looking to understand the state of the art in scientific knowledge.
If we were to continue the GitHub analogy, it would be great if ArXiv had a public "issue" list.