The peer review community has torched its reputation over the last decade, so it should surprise precisely nobody paying attention that profit-motivated publishers are crawling over what remains of that barrier.
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.
