Outside of academia I don't think anyone realizes just how broken the system is.
Citation extortion rings are part of every journal. I had a reviewer from Nature give feedback that I should cite her co-authors work on a topic that had nothing to do with my paper. It got rejected because I wouldn't. It went into archive and has been cited nearly a hundred times now. To add insult to injury Nature News asked to interview me about my work.
I'm a layman surrounded by laypeople and we regularly make fun of peer review. It's far from insider baseball, and verging on reality tv for a small but growing segment of the shitposting nihilistic demo.
Citation extortion rings are part of every journal. I had a reviewer from Nature give feedback that I should cite her co-authors work on a topic that had nothing to do with my paper. It got rejected because I wouldn't. It went into archive and has been cited nearly a hundred times now. To add insult to injury Nature News asked to interview me about my work.
Some more info on the subject, and a vast underestimation of how prevalent it is: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/cite-my-papers-els...
At this point if you can figure out how to make a pdf paper using latex I consider your work to be on par with anything in a journal.