> Evaluating the quality of studies/experiments

That's part of the problem. Publications are seen as achievements. If you got accepted to a prestigious journal or conference, you can list this on your CV as an impressive "award"-like thing. A publication list is not just a list of "Look, this is the kind of stuff I've been working on, have a great read at it", but "Look, my research is so great it got accepted to all these fancy places!".

Publications are therefore unfortunately not merely about sharing new info with the research community but an award show. Ideally a publication would be the start of the conversation: "this is what we found, this is the method we propose, what do you think of it, community? Will you pick it up?" The test is then whether the ideas get adopted. But that's harder to measure. Citations try to approximate it, but it's a very crude approximation. A citation, as such, may mean tons of different things: e.g. a) a deep critique (Negative impact) b) being cited as part of a long block of "these other works exist, too" (Low impact) c) another work substantially based on the deep ideas of the original paper (High impact), d) being listed in a table for comparison, ala "we beat this other method", but no other discussion of the original paper (Low impact), etc.

If a publication was nothing more than a "hey, look, this is interesting", then I'd say, publishing mostly novel sexy results would be fine! After all, the surprising cases are those that teach us the most. However, as I said earlier, a paper is not only about "hey, this is interesting", but a "hey I want to advance my career", too. And in a twisted way of logic, I can agree that therefore we could put a band-aid over some of the problem by publishing (rewarding) systematic work with negative or boring results. But ultimately, this goes against the original purpose of papers, that is alerting the scientific community to potentially new information that we haven't known about before.

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Ideally, to assess someone's scientific career, there would be at least one smart, attentive, impartial expert taking their time reading through the publications, taking notes, pondering, digesting it all, consulting other experts etc. However, this is too subjective.

Quantitative metrics seem superficially more objective and therefore egalitarian. The original idea is probably that if we just based everything on subjective judgement of scientific importance instead of publication count, there would be even more networking and friendship-based quid-pro-quo back scratching.

But everyone is overworked, and those who aren't, want to keep it that way. So nobody wants to put in the effort to actually interact with the deep content of research. It's too complicated and too opaque.

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The problem is, flashy results are by their nature more attention-grabbing on all levels. It's not just some small perverse incentive. This is how all of us work, this is how history works, how everything works. The winner takes all, the rich get richer etc. We remember the Einsteins of history, those who just worked systematically and didn't find much aren't heroes. And if that's our bar, then people will do everything to look like they clear it. In any system, scientists would have to hype up their impact, it doesn't matter who makes the decisions.

Currently, universities want to employ researchers who will make a visible impact. Because that means attracting funding, but also attracting bright people from all around. Career-conscious researchers want to go to universities that help them market themselves well (good PR departments etc). PR is not only for laypeople as the audience, there is such a flood of research nowadays that even the experts of a small niche cannot keep up with everything happening.

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The root of it is human nature, competition, deception, cliques, hierarchies. But the new about it is the scale of it, and the accompanying mechanization of it all. The idea that you can mass-manufacture innovation. That you can expect thousands upon thousands of researchers to make regular breakthroughs and, to say my field as an example, publish tens of thousands of novel AI-related ideas every year. It's related to credential inflation, and fake signaling: people with good academic track records got the good jobs and the respect, so people try to emulate that. Everyone tries to become the 1%, the rock star. And everyone wants to hire the 1%. So just like an evolutionary pressure, people try to appear like the successful. Soon enough the old signal doesn't work anymore. It used to be a high mark of educational level to have passed high school. Today that's a bare minimum. College used to be a meaningful differentiator. Now more than half of young people are "college educated" in developed countries. The next step is about becoming "researchers". Nowadays, having some publications is not a big differentiator. We see this also in title inflation like monkeying around in Excel is "data science" and "AI".

It's not just a monkey's paw. There is no central figure orchestrating it, asking the monkey's paw for more papers. It's a distributed system of agents acting in their self-interest. Nobody wants papers for papers' sake, they want to make defensible, justifiable decisions that will not get them fired and will pass satisfaction up opposite the path where the money is flowing, all the way to the CEOs, politicians and taxpayers.