The criticisms match my experience. In a comment to "The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?" (http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Intellectuals/23835...), I said that I went to grad school in English Lit and this resonates:

By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation, I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect." He found more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world.

I write more here: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-... and here: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-researc..., but academics in the humanities act like their peer-reviewed work doesn't matter at all. There are no pre-print services and no sense of urgency. Whether an article is published today or five years from today seems to be treated as if it's of little or no importance. The whole system is wildly dispiriting from an intellectual perspective.

Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching. Yet literary studies are, or should be, among the most accessible academic fields.