It's not abnormal in many fields. A lot of biology or physics papers have more than that number.

In academic labs, so you're a postgrad working the overnight shift watching some petri dish to make sure the bacteria doesn't die, etc. It's super boring grunt work but you do it so you get on the paper's author list.

Only in fields like foundation models and high-energy physics, where immense resources are required. Look at GPT-4's credits: https://openai.com/contributions/gpt-4

Particle physics papers usually have more pages for the names than for the work.

Anyone that even sniffed it can get in on the action