Maybe for the top 1 or 10% folks out there who are good enough at fraud to actually reliably get away with it. For the rest of us, I don't think this is true.
Modern academia has terrible incentives. The easy path to success comes from not rocking the boat, even the guys at Data colada (who did the leg work to prove the case) have made a lot of enemies in the field.
I’m willing to bet there’s a large amount of less significant fraud that gets better defended, it’s only the people who are so successful they let they guard down that get caught in this silliness.