The advantage of "publish or perish" is that it is based on something concrete. The system is gamed, for sure, and even more so with AI, but still, a paper which is cited a lot tend to be useful and the authors get rewarded.
Remove that metric, and for the lack of a better idea, it will just turn into a game of who has the best connections or who talks the most convincingly, I mean, even more than it is now.
The point is that not everything of value can be easily measured.
Instead of wasting some resources on corruption and bad judgement, we now waste them by forcing people to chase the wrong goal. In other words: "If you rely on incentives, you undermine values." (Barry Schwartz)
So I don't disagree with you, but I think we went too far into that direction. We have allow people to use their better judgement sometimes.
That misses the fact professors have plenty of other requirements beyond publications already. Teaching requirements, service requirements, chairing committees, taking on and graduating grad students. All of these are considered when one goes up for tenure.
Even with the technical debt. We have zillions of papers published, we know that most of them probably won't replicate, we don't know which ones.