alt Hacker NewsI have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.
But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?
The system, as you say, is fucked.
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.