I had a somewhat similar experience- was a postdoc for a pre-tenure professor at berkeley. after writing up a paper based on her methods, with poor results, I handed the draft to her. She rewrote it- basically adding carefully worded/presented results that made it look as good as possible. And then submitted it (to a niche conference where the editor was a buddy of hers). When I read her submission I asked her to remove my name from it and she immediately withdrew the submission. I left her lab shortly after because I am not going to tarnish my publication record with iffy papers like that.

Over time I learned that most papers in my field (computational biology) are embellished to some extent or another (or cherry-picked/curated/structured for success) and often irreproducible- some key step is left out, or no code is provided that replicates the results, etc. I can see this from two perspectives:

1) science should be trivially reproducible; it should not require the smartest/most capable people in the field to read the paper and reproduce the results. This places a burden on the people who are at the state of the art of the field to make it easy for other folks, which slows them down (but presumably makes overall progress go faster).

2) science should be done by geniuses; the leaders in the field don't need to replicate their competitors paper. it's sufficient to read the paper, apply priors, and move on (possibly learning whatever novel method/technique the paper shows so they can apply it in their own hands). It allows the field innovators to move quickly and discover new things, but is prone to all sorts of reliability/reproducibility problems, and ideally science should be egalitarian, not credentials-based.