In one of the neurology labs I was in at UCLA, I saw the same exact thing: publishing tons of garbage and not doing real science. There were some professors of higher integrity, but the PIs that were doing the garbage publishing were getting millions of dollars.

One of my PIs, who was doing this, had a term for his publishing strategy: "salami publishing". You try to cut as thinly as possible your research and publish as many papers on it as you can. That's actually less harmful than the real problem which is that the papers were just rubbish and people in the lab seemed to all kind of know, but disliked discussing it.