There are precious few exceptions to this rule unless they are very old or are Paul Erdos.
I'd much rather hear 'Professor X's most important contribution was Y.'
It's rather funny to me that for years, Cornell's biggest professorial scandal was Daryl Bem transitioning from groundbreaking psychology work to ESP studies. It was a much-discussed embarrassment for a while, then he started putting out successful ESP findings with uncommonly-good practice and people started worrying about what else you could prove in the same way.
These days, it looks like Bem may come out rosier than some professors there who were still on the rise while his ESP work was causing outrage. Most of Bem's results are disputed at best, but they were actual contributions which led to further study. His methodology and basic integrity have never been seriously indicted, which puts him leagues beyond Wansink and Sternberg.
With Bem, it's easy enough to talk about his most important 2-3 contributions and analyze their merits. The others look more like they were being paid by the word, and that should have been a warning even before the specific problems were found.
In any case, if this kind of thing is reported in the popular press, blogs, etc, it's because a scholar caught it and reported it, which means there are checks and balances that don't let this behaviour run wild all the time.
And then again, there's going to be differences between fields- some will suffer from this kind of problem more than others, etc. There's no reason to "tar everyone with the same brush".
If a PI has 3 collaborator PIs and each PI has 4 students writing a paper every three months then the PIs can get 48 publications a year. Over 20 years, there's your O(1000) publications in a model with no substantial PI time contribution.
Given teaching loads, home life, university admin, academic duties like reviews I'd be surprised if a senior academic got 3 days per week to do research. I'd say at that rate the 4 first-author level contribution publications per year model would be optimistic. So a more realistic cap on the quality work someone could do in 20 years might be 80 publications.
I doubt the parent academic had O(1000) first author publications, nor is that mentioned in the article.
But to track back to what was getting me bothered, it's the implication when Professor X is discussed or introduced somewhere that they personally thought up and wrote O(1000) publications.
I know good PIs guide the research activities of their groups as well rather than just creaming off publications.
But while I understand where you're coming from, stepping back and thinking about it 'authorship as a reward for leadership' could be a sign of unhealthiness in academia. Why can't authorship mean authorship and leadership be recognised separately? 'Professor X runs a highly successful lab of N researchers, who produced M papers last year, and manages a budget of Z dollars.'
I actually wonder if journals should start offering a second list of names on the first page, or even three to allow both group-leader and technical-work credit. Has this ever been tried?
I don't know how to square this expectation with my experience, as a PhD student (currently). My own problem with my thesis advisor is that I'm concerned that I don't contribute enough to our joint papers, because he's doing much of the job- most of the ideas are his and he writes at least half of each paper, and codes the odd implementation. And he's been doing that for the last 30 years or so (though not with me, obviously!).
I have heard the rumours- that career academics let their students do the hard work and just put their name on the finished paper. However, that presuposes that PhD students are already capable scientists who can be trusted to write a publisheable paper entirely on their own, even in their first year. I think that anyone who's been through a PhD, or helped guide someone through theirs will know how rare that is. Even just figuring out what an original contribution means in your chosen field can take a long time- unless, that is, you have someone at hand who understands the field, knows the bibliography and can recommend a promising research subject and also methods. At that point, that person has already done 1/3 of the work for you- figured out what you should try to publish. The other two thirds are to do the research and actually write up the paper.
Btw, in the UK were I study, the done thing is that the student's name goes first in any joint papers, while that of the advisor, or in any case, the most experienced member of the research team generally goes last. The advisor will still get citations to their name of course, but so will the people preceding them - and the first author, who is usually the student, will appear as the principal author whenever the names of the researchers are referenced (e.g. in author-year citation formats, or in slides, etc).
I tend to see this as a substantial boost to my own career as a researcher. Maybe even too much of a boost, in a way. I don't like to think I'm riding on someone else's coattails. But, the fact of the matter is that at the start of your research career, inevitably, that's what you are doing.
Academics has been infamously cutthroat for a while now. The iron law is that anything which can be gamed for advantages will be.
The system needs updating so that what is gamed for is closer to the actual desired results. I suspect actual logic being incorporated into the judgements will be required which only makes things fuzzier. It is easier for more concrete fields to fall back on industries or failing that just numbers if it gets too theoretical like say maximizing energy extraction from a solar system.
You can prove that say Kant has fewer followers than Ayn Rand but that says nothing about philosophical merits.