Depends on how you define “academic”. There are suddenly going to be a lot of “academics” showing up for their free handouts once there is no bar.

>I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.

Selection bias. The academics you are thinking of are the ones willing to put all of the work into getting grants, teaching, etc. There are an order of magnitude more PhD holders that nope out of academia after graduation because of the grim prospects.

No, they're motivated by safety. And there's nothing safer than the ivory tower. Academics would work on self-referential research until the end of time if they could get funding for it.

They create academia children in a perpetual loop trying their very hardest to avoid life and all its complexities (especially those of people, of which they are ludicrously blind) by living in their theoretical world of nothingness.

If that's the case, you're inevitably going to need some way to decide which of the many worthy opportunities merit sufficient investment and which ones do not.

Good point, becoming an academic may already represent enough of a hoop, though that’s just the CS perspective. In other fields there may not be much of a lucrative industry, so I’m not sure whether this will hold generally.