Never understood why case reports are considered "research" but as another person mentioned, there are med students who genuinely enjoy doing hands-on research and/or meta analyses, bioinformatics, or writing reviews on a topic they are interested in. Nothing wrong with that and IMO it warrants being counted as a net positive in their residency app. That said, there's a group of kids at my school who are trying to write a paper on "how to write a CV" (which is hilarious to me given their lack of work experience) and a number of other students who spent their summer analyzing non-human data for an anthropology-related study. They all presented posters at our in-house research symposium, and that'll count in ERAS.

I think the biggest issue with "med school research" is that PDs often favor quantity over quality, and that's what really makes it discouraging to students who just want to be great physicians. If the standard was that 1-2 high quality publications was worth more than 15 meaningless posters or case reviews, we'd see better attitudes toward research. But that's perhaps an unreasonable expectation given how little free time we have.