I would add that the problem is not new, and not limited to junior researchers.
In my first faculty position about 20 years ago, I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered. After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives.
It was extremely demotivating, to say the least. I switched to a different field and fairly soon afterward left academia altogether.
A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics.
I'm sad to hear that. I know of a PhD student who confided in me that his professor didn't believe his suspicion that the results of a well-known, supposedly top tool, are wrong. According to his view, not being able to replicate or improve that tool has prevented him from being allowed to graduate. While I cannot confirm this, I suspect there to be a grain of truth in the story. The results are indeed wrong, but I suspect the results are too big to fall -- too many people made too many mistakes (reviewers, editors, awards committees, hiring committees, etc.). It's sad.
This happened to me so often in a graduate student except that I thought my abilities as a bench chemist were poor and that’s why I couldn’t repeat many experiments from journals. I quit with a masters and I remember one incident after I decided to quit where my advisor and I were at odds because I could not get a yield that a paper described. He asked the star veteran PhD student to step in and help and he was never able to get anywhere near the published yield either.
I still don’t think I was a great bench chemist but I think about this a lot - especially because at the time many folks in my chemistry building dismissed failed reactions published in journals. They just shrugged them off and tried something else instead of reaching out and asking the publisher - “hey, I can’t get this to work, what am i doing wrong?”
What you wrote reminds me of the controversy around Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment [1]. It measured the charge of an electron. Later experiments confirmed the real value was slightly higher than Millikan reported. Many researchers who could not replicate Millikan's value just assumed that they did something wrong rather than questioning Millikan's value. It took a few decades, but fortunately science caught up with this. I often think about this when I see a colleague struggling to replicate something.
I am sympathetic. My understanding is limited to certain areas of biology but anecdotally, lab work sometimes just cannot be replicated for unknown reasons. Other fields such as academic psychology are dealing with what has been termed a "crisis of replicability" more or less across the board.
My take is that the main cause is poor methodology rather than outright falsification, but the outcome is the same: you can't trust a result until it has been confirmed in an independent study.
My brother in law only got one publication out of his PhD because his results were all negative, despite following a promising line of research. I'm glad to say that it wasn't a permanent setback -- he is now a full professor and edits a journal -- but it is a real testament to his ability and hard work that he could overcome that and succeed in a profession that is so demanding and competitive.
In my first faculty position about 20 years ago, I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered. After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives.
It was extremely demotivating, to say the least. I switched to a different field and fairly soon afterward left academia altogether.
A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics.