What policies are those? I thought 'publish or perish' was an expected outcome given the extreme supply/demand situation in the academic job market.

I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. The issue is that if there's a culture that encourages (incentivizes, not advocates) cheating, then we should expect a culture where more people cheat. I think right now it is hard to argue that the current culture doesn't encourage cheating, and if we're being honest, doesn't have a good means of identifying it (publish or perish also decreases reviewing quality).

There is utility in both speed and in a slow step. The truth is that we need both. A continuum of methods and ideas. After all, we are searching in the dark and our only real advantage is parallel Monte Carlo search. The problem is that this is incredibly difficult to accurately evaluate and we are arrogantly attempting to evaluate exceptionally noisy systems with extreme precision without even having a basic model of that system. We could relate this to businesses too, but the timetables for them are typically shorter and so the chaff can more clearly be gained (often post-explained through pure intent instead of it's combination with luck). Then again, we are trying to make academia a business, trying to apply their noisy successes to a completely different model.

Ugh.

There's plenty of honest researchers in the field.

You don't have to be corrupt to build a nice career and, now that I think of it, only people who are equally corrupt seem to embrace/justify/tolerate these practices.

This is multiplied several-fold when you are doing this populist intellectual dinner talk circuit in one of several countries whose elite are anxious to establish (or regain) their own scientific prestige on the world academic stage and will throw unbelievable amounts of money at the most brittle and flimsy proposals so long as there is an R1 institution attached.