And from here it is a short step to printing reports of people's research, without going through the verbal presentation first. In the golden age of scientific inquiry, which corresponds roughly with the lifespan of Albert Einstein, science was regarded as a communal enterprise in which scattered scholars co-operated with each other. Publishing your results was a way of helping other people, and inviting them to check and develop your work. This charming arrangement was rapidly superseded when it became clear much modern scientific work had financial or military value. Also, paper publishing has been superseded by the ubiquitous Internet.
People working in the same area keep in touch by e-mail.
So the continued production of academic journals now meets the needs of no real readers at all. Even academics themselves do not read them. There are simply too many. If you are planning a piece of research, of course, you have to find out what other people have done on the topic. But the sole real purpose of the journals is to provide a place where academics can improve their promotion prospects by publishing research which nobody reads.