A sort of reputation system is in place in almost all peer-to-peer societies, it tends to form automatically. I don't think we really need any of this weird mess of a system.
We have Wikipedia, we have open source, we have OSM, we have all sort of things that should be "impossible" given the dismal perception people have of other people. This perception is just plain wrong and really harmful.
It's a hard sell though. The cost of metering is subtle. The do-nothing tenured professor is visible.
Wikipedia, OSS, etc really are the shining beacons. Existence proof for something better. Someone needs to write The Cathedral and the Bazaar, but in non geekish.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, many in academia would just like to research and teach with some quite modest salary and don't have to think about money at all. E.g. I would gladly and with no hesitations take a €2000/month tenure and keep on doing what I'm doing just more efficiently for everybody. I've been trying to pitch this idea to the funders here in Finland, but to no avail, they simply don't care if the funding system is useful or not for the academic community or humanity, they're focusing on playing the same old (maybe 10 years or so here) application lottery that's not only waste of time, but corrupts the whole community and even the very content of thinking in academica.
"Money" in academia is really abstract as well, and when discussed its not salary, but funding for projects or students or such. And because the funding structure is so bizarre and convoluted you just see big numbers with currency signs flowing everywhere, but this doesn't seem to have much to do with anything concrete happening around.
If academia becomes a place where you can get rich, the system will be in just years corrupted into some bizarre thing where advertisers advertise to each other for the sake of advertising.
Luckily cats can't be herded.
Some of it is intentional "motive hacking." As you say, prestige, research funding and the like are as (or more) operative as salary.
Some of it is unintentional. Before publish or perish, publishing volume probably was a signal for something. I doubt it was ever a signal for high quality research, but low (or no) volume may have been a signal for low quality. Also, formal decision making bodies (like grant makers or tenure committees) tend to gravitate to quantitative, legible metrics.
Whatever the reason initially, publishing volume became a hugely important thing with impacts on many aspects of research.
At the same time, in CS especially, the number of researchers has also ballooned. That's a whole other strain on a system of, at core, knowledge dissemination.
SEO is a kind of explicit analogy. Google pagerank was modelled on academic publishing, and it worked until it went live. From that point, links started to decrease as a quality signal.. spam. Publish or perish is a similar sort of dynamic.
Honestly, I think most legible systems for determining merit have these sort of issues. If advancement, accolade, grants or somesuch are determined by a formal system, whatever that system used as a signal or metric becomes corrupted. Hence why Word-to-mouth, open data repos, conferences and just blogging and pushing stuff to git repos does work. It's informal.