As long as people mislead or make mistake unknowingly, it's fine to rely to self-correcting mechanism of science. The institutional rot is much deeper. It is not good to leave all this fraud to self-correcting mechanisms of science. We also have "trust" to worry about.
Maybe instead of throwing around ideas of "institutional rot" we can realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing "science" in the right way, are not out for material gain, do not engage in fraud, and are interested in truth and scientific advancement.
The fact that there are a vanishingly small # of cases where bad things happen in the process are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMHO. Certain segments of society like to hype these up (or even lie about their frequency) in order to discredit the scientific method.
"Institutional rot" is a meme that needs to go away. Identify the problems at the edges, fix them, and move on to letting the bulk of the work continue as it always has - quietly building upon previous valid results to the betterment of society.
As long as people mislead or make mistake unknowingly, it's fine to rely to self-correcting mechanism of science. The institutional rot is much deeper. It is not good to leave all this fraud to self-correcting mechanisms of science. We also have "trust" to worry about.