[garden_hermit]

Citation is not an endorsement—plenty of things are disagreed with in order to disagree with something, reference history in a field, or contextualize a result against past findings.

Here, the author seems to only look at recent papers, and so we don't really get to see how the citation patterns have evolved over 10, 20, or 30 years. But even then, established ideas tend to not be cited at all— the concept of "knowledge spillovers", for example, is common in Economics and other fields, yet the original reference is rarely used. Other times, more established claims will be encoded in a book or some work of theory—and people will cite the theory rather than the paper that made the original claim.