What is research misconduct of Xuetao Cao about?
Without considering the actual case. A referee is not an investigator/detective.  This is why figures/tables/photographs might be composed or manipulated without being noticed at first. 

It is right what you say: they look credible and likely make sense in the context of the work. Though, some entries look copied and pasted. This is a recurrent case. Sometimes the authors take a pace in which even ex-novo fabrication of data is time and energy consuming.

An example of how things can go is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal