That narrative is insane. It is one thing to produce shoddy research. Even good senior researchers sometimes just have a paper that... doesn't work out well, with a late found flaw in the methods that can't be fully mitigated or uninteresting findings, and then they'd rather still try to publish it than shelve months of work. That's not good, but almost unavoidable in the current academic environment.

The accusations here are very different: Producing fake data is fraudulent, of course the papers need to be retracted, and people involved and in the know need to be punished. The quote from the article describes well something that seems to be a growing group of people within academia:

> It's possible "these people don't care and never cared about the science," Michael Sanders, a professor of public policy at King's College London, said. "They talk about science, and they talk about experiments, and they sort of wrap themselves in the fabric of the scientific method — just as a way of selling stuff."