

Nothing in the Frontiers is reputable among scientists. It gets linked a lot on Reddit because it’s open access, but scientists tend to view it as essentially the not-actually-peer-reviewed equivalent of a preprint. In the past, if all reviewers recommend rejection at Frontiers, the editor would be forcibly assigned new reviewers by the publishing staff. This would continue until the manuscript would get accepted. Not sure if that’s still the same (I’ve blocked all Frontiers emails), but it’s not correct to call a Frontiers journal a major reputable journal.
Methods sections are limited in word count, and if a lab is hoping to get a few more papers out of a paradigm, they may be intentionally terse. There’s a big difference between how we write protocols in-house and how we write limited-length methods sections.