[dalbasal]

>> 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.