There's definitely a "rich get richer" effect for academic papers. A highly cited paper becomes a "landmark paper" that people are more likely to read, and hence cite - but also, at a certain point it can also become a default "safe" or "default" paper to cite in a literature review for a certain topic or technique, so out of expediency people may cite it just to cover that base, even if there's a more relevant related paper out there. This applies especially in cases where researchers might not know an area very well, so it's easy to assume a highly cited paper is a relevant one. At least for conferences, there's a deadline and researchers might just copy paste what they have in their bibtex file, and unfortunately the literature review is often an afterthought, at least from my experience in CV/ML.

Another related "rich get richer" effect is also that a famous author or institution is a noisy but easy "quality" signal. If a researcher doesn't know much about a certain area and is not well equipped to judge a paper on its own merits, then they might heuristically assume the paper is relevant or interesting due to the notoriety of the author/institution. You can see this easily at conferences - posters from well known authors or institutions will pretty much automatically attract a lot more visitors, even if they have no idea what they're looking at.