All the concerns are valid, of course, but there's one important caveat to cheating in academia:

Your career is a path dependency, and by cheating now, you may be brought down at any point in the future. In other words, cheaters need to make sure that their misconduct is detection-proof for a long time. That's not trivial. And once your career is tarnished, it's not easy to remain in academia, so your whole life concept is sabotaged.

Of course, some big players managed to weather scandals, but they arguably still took a serious hit to their credibility. For example, TED-famous psychologist Dan Ariely, who was the co-author of a paper with spectacularly forged data [1], and had to do an embarrassing public apology.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...