I do not think peer review adds much value over self-publishing. Consumers still need to read and verify the work themselves. Bad stuff gets published in peer review so often you still need to verify the integrity of everything yourself. For a simple hypothetical, say peer review is "good quality" 80% of the time, and self-published is good quality 50% of the time. These are made up numbers, but I am saying "80% is too low for the pain of peer review to provide much value". As a consumer I find 0 value in peer review (I can use google and read what I want, being published in peer review is an annoying paywall if anything).

I believe the majority of comments in peer review are not based on technical accuracy (what an outsider may think peer review is about, verifying if something is right or wrong), but tend to be more clearly opinions. So from a writer standpoint for people who say "peer review improves my work", that does not jive with my experience.

There are so many other negatives with peer review in academia (people bean counting pubs, paywalled, the club issue Daniel mentions), I just don't think it adds much of any value. If everyone decided tomorrow "I am just going to publish stuff on ArXiv" (or whatever preprint server), the world would not be worse off. I think we would be better off actually.