It would be if what got published were plenty of incremental papers. That's the case in certain fields (deep learning comes to mind) - but in other fields, such as the life sciences, you instead get a bunch of results that claim to be groundbreaking and novel - but in practice end up being very difficult to reproduce (like the STAP controversy).

Why? Because small incremental improvements cannot get published in high impact journals, and high impact journals are the currency to scientific prestige/grants/tenure.