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A more charitable explanation: universities use publication frequency as a proxy for your academic worth. Once the "publish or perish" pressure is released, you can focus on paper quality over quantity. Given the fire hose of trivial academic publications filling up journals, that's good news for everyone.

It never ends. After tenure it's about getting grants to have resources (equipment etc) and to hire a large enough team of PhD students and postdocs. Universities cover some of this by default but they expect profs to draw in third party funding and without extra grants you can't really keep up with the competition. And for grants you needs lots of papers in good venues.

There are a lot of professors out there, so "some" doesn't really mean much by itself.

Tenure allows lazy to be lazy, perhaps, but 'most' are not lazy by any reasonable standard. Tenure does allow tackling harder, more risky or non-normative research programs, which is probably a huge net positive

tenure means you can just coast . the incentives are misaligned