Literally anyone can upload an app in Google playstore and they won't have any kind of good screening process in it so there is a big chance that they will just re-upload their phishing apps.
It's true that Google sucks in that regard and that there is a lot of room for improvement but I don't think that they don't check apps at all. Problem is that they don't manually check each and every app made by a new developer. Or at least to manually check an app if there is already similarly named on available on Google Play.
I do like to think that they still block certain amount of phishing attempts, no matter how sucky and fallible their screening process is.