There's no "collective delusion" here. There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on. This is slowly starting to change, but it's still pretty much the rule.

For a while passive voice was recommended by lots of courses and some advisors, but I reality most journals never recommended passive voice and now many (most) actively discourage it (e.g. here is the nature style guide https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/for-authors/write) , because it makes texts much more difficult to understand. It is quite funny how passive voice became prevalent, it was not common in the beginning of the 20th century but somehow become quite common especially in engineering. It is only quite recently (~10 years) that the move is to back to active voice.

> There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on.

Established tradition doesn't negate "collective delusion".

And anyone who uses the use of "I" in a paper to imply anything about its authenticity is definitely indulging in some form of a delusion. It's not the norm, but is definitely permitted in most technical fields. When I was in academia no reputable journal editor would take seriously reviewer feedback that complains about the use of I.

Yeah yeah, but it's not the interesting part here. It's not as if flaunting this convention means we can be confident you're a fraud.