> Establish peer review as the metric of tenure and make dam sure those peers know their stuff.

And you are back at square one: peer reviews become the currency used in academic politics. A relatively small group of tenured academics have all the incentives to independently form a fiefdom. Anonymization does not help as everyone knows work and papers of the rest anyway.

The supply of knowledgeable and conscientious reviewers in, say, machine learning, is far outmatched by the number of papers less knowledgeable and conscientious people submit.