It seems to me, still, that a lot of these problems you bring up can be addressed by universities changing their hiring policies. Which makes sense: academics ultimately rely on universities for their income, and so it is the hiring policies which are setting the perverse incentives. And I don’t think changing hiring policies would be an incremental change, it would be a huge change (and not likely to be made by any university any time soon, since students rank universities on similar metrics to how universities hire staff — a prestigious university will lose prestige even if it changes its hiring policies for the better).