Pessimistic take: after the two stages you mentioned, in the third stage they will carry on BSing as usual (only more efficiently with LLMs now) and there will be no one to point out that the emperor is naked.
That's exactly the direction it's going in. As long as there is money in this, the charade will go on forever. It's not like no one knows that majority of the "science", produced currently, is with the purpose of advancing in the education hierarchy, not concerned with actually expanding human knowledge.
Spending your effort trying to advance human knowledge is, after all, a sure way to lose out and get fired. If you don't spend all your time chasing the measured goals, you won't match up to the people who do.