I'm, unfortunately, very familiar with the LPU (Least Publishable Unit) after having been to grad school. It's actually a thing, especially among pre-tenure people.
Example from the programming world: github profiles are used as a hiring tool, programmers start dumping thousands of undocumented useless "projects" into github.
after that: "researchers overshare data and use each others data for no reason but to bump numbers"
it's interesting how every system tends to sooner or later be gamified by its players