The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough money in the system and there aren't enough professorships for the legions of PhD students that exist. We eit

The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough money in the system and there aren't enough professorships for the legions of PhD students that exist. We either need to cap the number of PhD students much more aggressively or we need to spool up many more institutes and increase funding dramatically. If you set the bar for tenure at people who are publishing in Nature or Science or prestigious journal X then people will just come up with ways to game that too. The other thing that goes unsaid is that huge swaths of researchers in the US are immigrants on visas. If they cannot find that next postdoc they will be kicked out of the country. This creates a massive incentive to do whatever you need to do to get your next opportunity.