Use of the CC BY ND license is meant to reflect the common practice of sharing academic papers, which was often done informally, as opposed to a paywall. I can send you a copy of my paper; you can pass on copies to colleagues. But in doing so, you wouldn't edit it. That's not a freedom which is necessary for sharing a paper. The paper is a complete product. Moreover it would be a breech of the integrity of the work to edit it. If a correction is required, there is a proper route for that: erratum or corrigendum, published in the original venue.
The first catch of "ND" is that this excludes translation, but that really is not considered to be an issue for two reasons: (1) Scientists are generally expected to be proficient in English and able to read a paper in English - as once was the case for chemists being proficient in German. (2) For popularization and dissemination, media outlets are able to write summaries in other languages.
The second catch is that we really should have some kind of formal secondary license for images and figures within a paper (ideally CC-BY), to allow them to be used separately, since reuse of these should be as frictionless as possible. As a former grad student, it was a pain when writing the review section in a thesis! Though many journals & academic publishers achieve this through having blanket forms that an academic can download for permission to re-use images; for others one needs to consult with the authors of a paper which can be tricky.
And to counter your other comment:
> Ancillary and auxiliary sources are key to scientific criticism.
The licensing does nothing whatsoever to prevent scientific criticism. The Berne Convention [1] explicitly allows for quoting from other works, even if not licensed whatsoever:
> 10.1 It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public, provided that their making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose, including quotations from newspaper articles and periodicals in the form of press summaries.
Criticism is never a matter of editing someone else's work; it's commenting about the work. You don't need a license to do that. If one has free access to the full text, which CC BY ND provides, then one has everything necessary to understand the criticism.
[1] https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283698