I think the main problem is not in itself incentivizing papers or using papers as a metric. The problem is that they're in many ways the only thing incentivized

I think the main problem is not in itself incentivizing papers or using papers as a metric. The problem is that they're in many ways the only thing incentivized and the only metric given serious consideration. And the general expectations for/form of a paper are so homogenized across a given field. This makes it very feasible to game the system in a particular way that is bad for science. It's also a serious misallocation of incentives purely from a system functioning perspective. At the very least you need to incentivize peer review alongside incentivizing papers. Currently there is hardly any incentive at all to help carefully review papers, so we have no checks and balances in place to deal with the natural result of incentivizing the writing of papers. If there were greater heterogeneity in scientific roles it wouldn't be so bad for some to have heavy paper incentives -- because there'd be others with heavy incentives to do a good job highlighting the best papers and finding flaws in the bad ones.