On the other hand, I think a lot of these "bad graphs" are very intentionally chosen precisely in order to hide the small number of data points, or an underlying distribution that looks suspicious, etc.
So it's not so much "friends don't let friends", but more "when you see a graph that chooses to obfuscate rather than clarify, suspect it might be intentional".
Plots often fail to clarify for the precise reason that clarification takes time and effort and those things are lacking in academia in spades. Are people intentionally hiding ugly details, definitely on occasion? But I don't think it's the primary source of such bad figures.
I've had four decades of crunching numbers in a variety of Engineering, Geophysics, and science applications with a hefty amount of public consulting on a variety of applications and of the large population of those good at gathering and recording data perhaps only 20% had that extra talent for good visualisation to convey meaning without distortion.