That said, gravitational waves (the subject of that paper) are pretty strange, they run headlong into the problem that you can't allocate the energy and momentum of the gravitation field in a local way. (For the electromagnetic field you can write down a formula for the energy/momentum density as a function of location and time, for the gravitational field you can't.)
Physicists are struggling today with this locality problem, for instance the "event horizon" of a black hole in GR is not a local property and that leads to a lot of confusion, particularly over
Everybody is free to publish their research without going throught peer review even today.
It can still be science, but won't be trusted much before someone of authority comments on it.
Pre-publication peer review is a vehicle for winning "academia points", important for career promotions, grants and similar.
Science then and now has depended on reviews from expert peers, it's just that the number of scientists (this is good, remember) has given a rise to scientific journals and formal pre-publication peer review to filter out some of the crap.
Either side can be wrong in a peer review (or both), but the approach has to work in majority of the cases to be meaningful.
Gamification is a problem with anything in life, so we just have to live with that and change when the method stops giving useful results.
The royal society published for centuries, although I'm not sure it was review as much as paid for. But there was an element of acceptance/certification to be a member I think. With the internet, everybody can publish everywhere. And we might find out that "peer review" isn't the proper metric, it's "citation/use".
This blog post claims Einstein had one paper peer reviewed
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific...
and it is backed up by this
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822
That said, gravitational waves (the subject of that paper) are pretty strange, they run headlong into the problem that you can't allocate the energy and momentum of the gravitation field in a local way. (For the electromagnetic field you can write down a formula for the energy/momentum density as a function of location and time, for the gravitational field you can't.)
Physicists are struggling today with this locality problem, for instance the "event horizon" of a black hole in GR is not a local property and that leads to a lot of confusion, particularly over
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics)
which is a much more significant paradox in my mind than that long-settled information "paradox."