alt Hacker NewsMDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.
"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.
They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.