The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.
TL;DR politics breaks everything.
My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!
Were these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.
When the number of people is small enough, it's not too hard to figure out the identity of supposedly anonymous people.
I've done that once in an anonymous chat group with about 35 people in it.
That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?
Hard to say but my impression is that most academics are honest and would try not to do this, but also there are rivalries between labs and that tends to encourage "everything they do is bad and we're great" mentalities so it's definitely not surprising.
Yeah, the scientific review process is extremely weird. I've had several papers published and the responses you get from reviews is sometimes complete nonsense. Sometimes it feels like some reviewers do little more than skim your paper or get a power trip off of rejecting people. Lots of politics and people trying to reject ideas that are counter to the ones their own labs are pushing. I don't blame the authors for expecting to get push back from their work, many breakthroughs are usually met with resistance from the status quo.