With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.

I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.

It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.