A lot of researchers do make their results available as code and a whole lot of those who don't actually publish lies, as many people in academia from grad students to professors who implemented research papers and observed that the algorithms don't really work discovered.
File paths and manual steps can be worked around, mobody said it should build and run painlessly forever after having been published on any future system with no tweaking and with the researcher indefinitely maintaining the program. If however nothing remotely close to a working state can be published it's not a great sign.
Yes, many do release code, and it is a great thing! But not everyone's research is represented by code (even within CS). Sometimes research also depends on data that cannot be shared publicly, obscure user interfaces, commercial libraries, includes yet to be published work, etc. In those cases, pushing out without the dependecies may also give the impression of poor research, because it appears to be broken.
File paths and manual steps can be worked around, mobody said it should build and run painlessly forever after having been published on any future system with no tweaking and with the researcher indefinitely maintaining the program. If however nothing remotely close to a working state can be published it's not a great sign.