In Academia, Pats on the Back Are Rare

That might be true but speaking from experience, I suspect in academics it's a little different. Not trying to be dismissive but I do think there's something about mid-career academics that is especially problematic. Academics in general is problematic, but this issue in particular is especially problematic.

In my department, for example, reviews started being every 5 years when you got tenure, which is a recipe for disaster depending on the nature of your department, how collegial and collaborative they are, if communication is functional or dysfunctional, if the politics is bad, and so forth and so on. The university itself was saying things like "after you get tenure the route to full professor is extremely variable and you shouldn't plan on any kind of typical trajectory." You have tenure now, right? So this should be some kind of comment on your judgment, right?

Just consider grants: no one would dispute that getting papers published in very famous journals, and many grants with much money from famous granting institutions is a good thing from the perspective of the institution, administratively. But is that necessary for good science? Is that what makes a good scientist? There are heated debates about this in the field, from inside and out, and now you have to apply that to deciding what to do.

Higgs (of the Higgs boson) for example, when interviewed after the discovery, immediately made it be known that the university he worked for had long wanted to eliminate him for being unproductive. This is Peter Higgs.

In my department there was a similar, although not as well known issue. One of the faculty was literally one of the most cited figures in the field, in the sense that there are bibliometric papers studying "what are the most cited people in X?" and this person was in the top five. And by "field", I don't mean some specific subfield, I mean the sort of breadth that would merit a large building in a liberal arts college 40 years ago. Like computer science, physics, history, chemistry, etc. This faculty member didn't have any grants (although they're extremely prolific publishing) because they don't need it for their research. But they got treated like trash because they didn't have grants.

Not everyone is of this stature, but the issues are the same. What do you do if you you're in career X and start to have serious concerns about the values of the field as a whole? What if no one talks about any of it for years?

Or to turn it around, the author was talking about service. She was discussing how service was looked down on at some level in her department. In my department it was somewhat the opposite: service was partly the route to administration, which was seen as the ultimate goal in some ways. If you were a good scientist, you were good at managing others, administering grants, and were active in attractive-sounding service roles, which meant that being in an administrative positions and service was a sign of an especially good scientist, etc. People only got raises and promotions if they were being groomed for administrative positions, which required service. If you "just wanted to do science", do grants, papers, it was not good for your promotion.

I sort of feel like you could write a longform essay about this problem and it still wouldn't be enough.