Lol not trying to be snarky but if you think academics push out papers for purely monetary reasons then I suspect you are very far from academia in your day to

Lol not trying to be snarky but if you think academics push out papers for purely monetary reasons then I suspect you are very far from academia in your day to day life. Of course PIs have goals besides money! If their main goal was ever money they're an idiot for sticking to the university lab, and it's not like science profs didn't have other career opportunities available. That doesn't change the fact that the most common non-monetary goal of academics is in fact pretty well aligned with behaviors such as: publishing very frequently/flag planting, farming citations on old publications, exaggerating work in presentations and media press releases, etc. Not all of these behaviors are inherently bad but they easily can be and too often are taken to an extreme. Said goal is of course intellectual credit, or from a more cynical lense pure ego stroking. And it is indeed a rampant non-monetary incentive in academia. Anyway, I don't see the problem with someone who has recently pursued a PhD or beyond in academic science ripping on "career scientists". This is the sort of (mostly) informed criticism that science should welcome. Though some are overly negative, they usually still have relevant insights into problems in their field, and it is silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is markedly different from someone that frequently criticizes scientists from the outside while lacking any actual insight into the relevant technical complications, especially if that person is casting a wide net in what they criticize. The goal of a lot of modern scientific criticism is to further the conversation amongst those presently in the field, and help those adjacent to the field make more informed decisions - including prospective/very early career trainees, potential interdisciplinary collaborators, and anyone that has a role in directing possibly relevant funding opportunities. If criticisms get co-opted by other individuals for irrelevant goals that is unfortunate but it does not make the criticism invalid. It's also somewhat difficult in the social media age to avoid commentary that gains steam in the scientific community from reaching broader public exposure, which indeed opens it to misinterpretation. But the alternative of walled off information a la the old school journal publication system is obviously problematic for other reasons. That is a long winded way of saying that I think some amount of harsh publicly viewable criticism is sorely needed by a number of scientific fields right now, including my own (very much not physics). The fact that criticisms which from what I can gather where initially internally directed eventually gained such external exposure tells me that the message resonated with many scientists, even if just earlier career ones. Whether this person has started to profiteer on their cynicism is tangential to the validity of the original core message IMO.