As someone who spent 4 years working on a PhD (wireless/RF technology) and then quit, your points 2 and 3 ring a lot of bells. I think "journal of failed experiments" is a wonderful idea.
Anyone can put a paper on arXiv. The bigger problem is that most journal editors will be skeptical of citing arXiv. If you're collaborating with more traditional academics it can be a challenge to even submit a paper with such citations.
I've had to push my colleagues to cite a number of non-traditional sources: arXiv, github, and zenodo for example. Fortunately most of them agree that citations are cheap and that giving more people credit is generally a good thing.
One thing that helps is publicly stating how you want your research cited. If you don't have a peer reviewed publication in the pipeline, tell people how to cite your work on a blog or your github page or somewhere. Most people default to peer-reviewed journals for citations and get confused when one doesn't exist, so an explicit statement really helps.
I think that's less true than it used to be: a lot of papers now cite bioarxiv or arxiv preprints. I've never gotten any pushback and most journals explicitly allow it.
Cell (and other Cell Press journals, including Neuron and Current Biology): "Posted preprints may also be included in the References list with appropriate identification information...." https://www.cell.com/cell/authors
PNAS: "Preprints are cited as follows with a DOI or preprint ID number, and the date of posting...."https://www.cell.com/cell/authors
Unfortunately as an academic it's really hard to justify spending time on writing up a paper that's only going to be published on arXiv. Regardless of citations, it doesn't count towards your publication quotas or PhD requirements.
I've had to push my colleagues to cite a number of non-traditional sources: arXiv, github, and zenodo for example. Fortunately most of them agree that citations are cheap and that giving more people credit is generally a good thing.
One thing that helps is publicly stating how you want your research cited. If you don't have a peer reviewed publication in the pipeline, tell people how to cite your work on a blog or your github page or somewhere. Most people default to peer-reviewed journals for citations and get confused when one doesn't exist, so an explicit statement really helps.