You need some kind of ranking. Anyone who have tried to write a scientific paper know how much junk there is being published through the "pay to publish" channels and it will just get worse with the technical development of chatGPT. Journals with high prestige tend to work as a barrier for junk.
More generally, curation has value (see web search or even hardware like an iPhone). And to your point, curation value is increasing because the volume of stuff needing to be curated is growing at what feels like an exponential rate.
