[phdelightful]

Your impression is correct. Peer review would never catch this. Peer review basically assumes the counter party is operating in good faith, and as a result a thorough peer review basically is the following:

* is the treatment of existing work semi-thorough (even experts don’t know everything) and fair?

* are the claims novel w.r.t the existing work? If not, provide a reference to someone who has already done it.

* can you understand the experiments?

* do the experiments and their results lead to the conclusions claimed as novel?

* does the writing inhibit understanding of the technical content?

No peer review I have ever seen or done would catch anything but the most egregious bug of this nature.