The journal that published Sokal didn't use peer review and they rejected him at first, then requested a bunch of changes that he refused. They published him because they were collecting articles dealing with the "science wars" between scientists and the humanities and he was one of only two scientists to submit papers for it.

It's less of a big deal than everyone makes it out to be.

The more I read about the Sokal affair the more I hate everyone involved honestly.

Exactly, a lot of defensive sociologists will point out that it's not hard to get fake papers published in predatory journals (I recall some papers about Midiclorians, from Star Wars, being published in a bio journal).

But Sokal got his completely bullshit paper published in Social Text, one of the leading American Sociology journals, which should have at least done enough verification to know that this is bullshit

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science—among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.