Science corrupts. Absolute science corrupts absolutely.

Scientific consesnus can only be obtained via orchestrated targeted financing with T&C attached, hence scientific consensus is anything but science.

Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

China, India, Russia, Iran, etc, are merelly catching up with what US and Europe were doing for decades now, if not for over a century, where genuine works never get published because... it contradicts the trend established by the money providers and their politcal minions, while bullshit papers get published because... backed up by big money and a powerfull political machine, and every now and than retracted because too baltantly fake, and now you get angry because the rest of the fake world and their fake as our academia people are competitng with our fake academia and beat us at our own game of faking academic research papers... lol.

University research is a for profit business. They have to give the funders what they want or else they go out of business. "Science" is much more fraudulent than most people have yet understood,

In academia it only counts if it's published in an scientific journal. The more famous the journal the better. It's how you get grants and keep your employment.

Publicly funded research is chosen by committees, who take input from researchers who review the submissions. People who want to challenge current research are reviewed by people who created the current research.

Peer review is not the way things should go, one can always make a pact with other 10 scmamers to peer review eachother and always win, in fact this is how is been working for decades now. Replicating the experiment with same results should be the way, replicating with the intent to fail it and find if the whole thing is not a scam or plagiarism. Once a paper is pubblishesd everybody in the sector should try to replicate the experiment, just for the fun of finding out if it is a fake paper or not, also everybody should hunt down plagiarism, and those two sectors is where the money should go, unmasking the fake. Obviously big companies and corporations, and most governments, will never agree to funding that. Because... poatatoes.

This issue runs way deeper than just "quantity over quality". There is plenty of politics involved here, the least of all people seeking promotions. Corporations trying to insulate their products from contrary research; political parties trying to falsely legitimize questionable public policy; biased scientists steeped in dogma trying to push their own precious ideologies. Science is not as 'objective' as people like to think it is. Never was, never will be.

This is why you should always question the science, not trust it. Trust nothing, it is just not science, at all... only propaganda, money backed propaganda dressed as science that no one is authorised to question, and if questioning it is a no go, than for me that is a religion, not science, and I am not a religious person by definition.