However, the other big product of universities is education (and I think it’s fair to say that most people who would think of attending one see the value in universities through how they can educate, rather than whatever research is going on). And “shipping” good lessons, close connections with students, and great results is rarely recognised, and doesn’t help you get a job in the future. (It might help you look better compared to someone publishing equally as many or impactful papers, but it’s the papers first).
The other thing that this publish-regularly mentality can prevent is very long-term forward-looking projects - for some problems it is not clear what an answer should even look like, let alone how to get there. The closest thing to compare it to might be starting a new company - perhaps it takes 6 to 12 months to work on a product enough to start selling it. This is time that people simply don’t have in some academic fields, where they will be seen as underperforming, so it discourages these long-term projects entirely.
Totally agreed with you Re: teaching. I think universities are systematically not valuing teaching enough in my opinion. That said, at my university (UCLA), if you are a great teacher, teaching large, popular and impactful classes; you will get recognized and promoted for it. But when people bring up the publish or perish trope, it's not about spending time building better classes and teaching material.
In terms of 6-12 months, if you don't have that much time, it's likely your past bets haven't paid off and people aren't that willing to give you more resources. I definitely had lots of projects that still haven't paid off 7 years into them; but I get to keep playing on them because some of my other bets have. That's the way it works, but I don't think that is that bad. There are many professors with terrible ideas that they think are great and are indignant that no one will support them unconditionally.
The other thing that this publish-regularly mentality can prevent is very long-term forward-looking projects - for some problems it is not clear what an answer should even look like, let alone how to get there. The closest thing to compare it to might be starting a new company - perhaps it takes 6 to 12 months to work on a product enough to start selling it. This is time that people simply don’t have in some academic fields, where they will be seen as underperforming, so it discourages these long-term projects entirely.