Exactly this. You would be surprised how petty and subjective academics are in practice. There is a reason why everything is done through committees in academia.
Sayre's Law[1] was paraphrased by Henry Kissinger as, "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small."
> "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."
I hadn't heard of Sayre's Law. It seems like a much more eloquent expression of the concept of bikeshedding.
Edit: I thought about this some more. I think bike shedding and sayre's law are slightly different - Sayre is like the law of gravity, bike shedding is like saying “and this is what gravity actually is caused by”.