It kinda makes sense to me. The people who are most likely to have a high citation count are those who value making publications. Those who treat publications a

It kinda makes sense to me. The people who are most likely to have a high citation count are those who value making publications. Those who treat publications are the primary goal are probably those most likely to take an "ends justify the means" approach to publishing. (That's not to say all those who value publication count are unethical, just that the unethical group is more likely a subset of those whose primary metric is publication count). Goodhart's Law says: "When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure." When the target is "publication or citation count" rather than "meaningful research or the pursuit of truth" things can get weird.