I agree that the academic world is broken, but this narrative that success -- in any field -- isn't dependent on your ability to sell yourself is problematic.
I left academia behind because I saw that it was a brutal, improbable grind, sure, but mainly because I could see that the same skills needed for success as a professor had a much higher expected value elsewhere. In academia or otherwise, disproportionate success comes to those who combine ability with self-promotion. The people who put their heads down and focus on obscure problems will always be at the mercy of the winds.
Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal for everyone if these people are blocked from making contributions to science.
Grants are one of the least bad means of evaluating a researcher, because the decisions are not made lightly. Getting funded usually implies that experts have spent a nontrivial amount of time judging the merits of the applicant and their ideas and found them particularly worthy.
Moreover you're trying to do this for generally very smart people, so obviously they adapt their behaviour to those metrics (they game the system is a less favourable way of saying this). So the only thing you have achieved that the academics change their work to maximize those metrics. We have seen this with grants as well, to be successful you essentially have to write lots of grant (a period without grants can be career ending), so academics spend up to 50% of their time on grant writing and reviewing. At this point I'm not convinced a lottery would not be a better way of distributing money (and I say that as someone who has been fairly successful at getting grants)
Sure...lots of people make fantastic technical workers, and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. I'm not denying their existence. I'm saying that academia is an organization made up of humans, and as such, has the same bias toward self-promotion and social skills as any other field. At the end of the day, people make the decision of who get to be professors, get grants, and so on. Success in an academic discipline, for most people, is about being known, liked and respected amongst the small circle of colleagues who dominate that discipline.
The mythology I am combatting here is that academia was ever this magical unicorn land where introverts and brilliant weirdos can prosper. It happens more often than some fields, I guess, but mostly the same social dynamics apply. It's kind of the same wishful thinking you see from brilliant engineers who can't work on a team -- they invariably stop progressing, and wonder why they don't get promoted up the technical ladder. They can still contribute in the area of their greatest skill, but they're limited in the long run by their social abilities.
It's really common to see brilliant people with no interpersonal skills wash out in grad school. It's almost a cliché. The ones who do make it, rarely advance to a professorship -- they'll get stuck at postdoc or staff scientist or something like that, because some professor is more than willing to keep them around, hidden in the lab, for their exceptional technical skill.
On the other...there is no other hand.
How could this work? If you have more grant money you have more resources to write papers.
Would work simply: fund students directly. If faculty contribute training or ideas students can grant authorship. Faculty/postdocs still peer review papers.
I guess there’s still a need for bigger grants because some labs cost more than others to run, but those grants could cover the cost of equipment and materials without having to directly cover student salaries.
I don't know a particularly good way to get around this issue and still reward faculty for collaboration with students, but, in this situation, faculty are just going to pressure students to 'recognise' their (the faculty's) contributions with an authorship—say, by threatening to withhold a recommendation letter.
I totally agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but I don't see how your proposed solution would solve anything.
First of all, grants are needed to do any meaningful research and advance one's careers in most fields, authorship or no authorship. So the incentive to spend a disproportionate amount of time selling oneself would still be there.
Second, as you yourself imply, the reasons why young faculty don't take a more active role in research are (mostly) not voluntary, it's because they are forced into the grant treadmill. I don't see why they deserve punishment (in the form of fewer authorships) on top of that. They're already overworked getting the grants and you want them to spend more hours in the lab to get authorships in addition?
Third, how do you even police authorships? Especially when a person has a position of power due to having the funding with which other people in the lab are hired. There are already guidelines from scientific societies that in theory don't allow people who just obtained the funding to claim authorship, but people do it anyway. Even if someone complained, they can claim that they actually contributed (e.g. by going through the paper, checking and polishing for correctness) and it's very hard to disprove.
I think the solution has to be to the tune of (1) funding purely based on past CV, not projects (spare us all the effort of convincing reviewers that what we're going to do is the bee's knees, and drawing fictional Gantt charts when in research it's practically impossible to predict anything. If we have produced relevant results in the past, we will probably keep producing them); (2) flatter funding (reward better CVs with better funding, but keep decent enough funding for everyone to keep feedback loops at bay and not throw people that got unlucky with experiments under the bus); and (3) individual funding for everyone instead of a large chunk of funding that goes to the head of the lab.