The problem is that somehow researchers managed to get hundreds of millions of dollars, entire labs, and 15+ years of research on the back of a study that presumably nobody ever tried to replicate, nor did they notice that the claims weren't true even when building new research on top of it. That's the problem and it is frankly very hard to understand how it's possible.

This was (mostly) true back then, but it is definitely not true today. People tempted to commit fraud now have to be worried about people like Elisabeth Bik exposing them and ruining their careers. In my experience, the type of people known lie in papers overlap strongly with those that are career-minded/money-driven. So having a few journalists with the skills to detect fraud is an obvious win. Some of the frauds will just get better at, that's just how it does, but it's not like there are no imaging experts in the field.