>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.

I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.

[1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf