It's worth noting that citation counts are an increasingly poor metric of paper quality (and always has been).

There are multiple works to show that the rise of search engine like Google Scholar have meant that researchers are increasingly citing the same papers, because their searches are all returning the same thing.

Meanwhile, there are some "sleeper" papers that are super relevant to a lot of works, offer great insight, but by virtue of their low search ranking, never get cited.

That's not to say there isn't a fair amount of unremarkable research. It's just that it doesn't always correlate with citation count.