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I generally agree with this statement. Mistakes in references are not the lightning rod of improper science that recent policies make them out to be. Moreover, an entirely made-up reference is not the same thing as a reference with errors.

I guess the silver lining is that if these policies persist, good tools will be created for checking references and we can all more easily find the small errors that until now have largely gone unnoticed.

This policy as stated wouldn’t ban you over a dead link, but you should check (all of) your references enough to know that they exist. Or do you have a different failure mode in mind?

Here's an example of a "hallucinated" citation from a decade ago (i.e. pre-LLMs). The same bad citation appeared in multiple papers. I eventually traced the source to Google Scholar (and it's now fixed).

That’s not a hallucinated citation. There’s a real paper of that name by those authors. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but LLMs have been generating “citations” of papers that literally do not exist. If you typed the purported title and authors into google, nothing would come up, unlike this paper.

Even publisher-provided references are not always flawless, but surely that is not what we're talking about here. The chatboxes make up titles that don't exist, listing purported authors that have never written those papers. Surely if there is anything we can ban outright, it should be that?

I think the only important think is the doi. Once you have the doi you can get the bib entry via doi2bib. I think its reasonable to expect authors to verify the doi of the papers they cite...