> But even putting aside the fact that claiming someone else's writing as one's own is wrong, the value in survey papers is in how they re-frame the field. A survey paper that just copies directly from the prior paper hasn't contributed anything new to the field that couldn't be obtained from a list of references.
Whether or not a survey paper is "good" is irrelevant here. Yes, a survey paper that just lists others papers may be a bad survey paper, but it does nothing wrong as long as it cites the original papers, which this does. A bad survey paper may not be published in a journal, that's what peer review is for, but there is nothing wrong with publishing it openly on the web.
And there is still value in aggregating other papers, even if it's just a list with description. That's the reason why these "awesome-XX" Github repos are so popular. Time to hunt them down?