Well, it's not so much about the readers of the research (especially in some disciplines, most of them access articles through arXiv), but about the academics on tenure track of grant application committees. They're not actually going to read the research of the hundreds of applicants they have to judge, but will rather rely on proxy measures such as the journals they have published in.

See e.g. https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...