There are definitely top-notch journals largely serving this purpose. And I know several academics tenured via such a strategy.

I'll refrain from writing a wall of text on this, but my main point would be that the current objective function largely has a blindspot (open source software as intrinsic scholarship), and that overloaded people tend to be forced to optimize their critical path to "success". And software is decidedly not in the critical path, as you have mentioned.