The problem is that raw citation counts are used for promotion and hiring. And they look the same for 'did groundbreaking work' as for 'actually so flawed that everyone cites it just to make fun of it and as a cautionary lesson to everyone else to not be so incompetent'. Some authors explicitly take a mercenary attitude and don't care about sloppiness - after all, if someone criticizes them, that just means their citation count goes up...
With respect, I think you don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen cases where a researcher will cite a paper to poke fun at it. One might cite an erroneous paper in order to point out errors if one were interested in surveying the types of errors which occur in Science. However; (i) that paper is unlikely to be famous and; (ii) even then it's considered poor form to shit on your colleagues.
