The stakes are in fact very high for the academics themselves. There’s night and day difference between getting tenure, and not.
I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+.
At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.