I worked in the academic world for two years. What I saw was that lots of people are under a constant pressure to publish, and quantity is often put above quali

I worked in the academic world for two years. What I saw was that lots of people are under a constant pressure to publish, and quantity is often put above quality. I've seen papers without any sort of value or reason to exist being bruteforced through reviewing just to avoid some useless junk data of no value whatsoever being wasted, all to just add a line on someone's CV. This is without saying that some Unis are packed of totally incompetent people that only got to advance their careers by always finding a way to piggyback on someone else's paper. The worst thing I've seen is that reviewing papers is also often offloaded to newly graduated fellows, which are often instructed to be lenient when reviewing papers coming from "friendly universities". The level of most papers I have had the disgrace to read is so bad it made me want to quit that world as soon as I could. I got to the conclusion the whole system is basically a complex game of politics and strategy, fed by a loop in which bad research gets published on mediocre outlets, which then get a financial return by publishing them. This bad published research is then used to justify further money being spent on low quality rubbish work, and the cycle continues. Sometimes you get to review papers that are so comically bad and low effort they almost feel insulting on a personal level. For instance, I had to reject multiple papers not only due their complete lack of content, but also because their English was so horrendous they were basically unintelligible.