I agree mostly. The peer review process in scientific journals meets a certain standard, but you can get bad reviews. You can get reviews that are inaccurate, you can get reviewers who have misunderstood the material, and you can get reviewers who are too busy to do a good review. It's an accumulation of material, more than if you point to one paper here and one paper there, which is harder to defend.
A lot of the government science has dwindled to the point where you have to go to outside funding, and that's what raises some of these issues.