My background is in humanities but the dynamics are the same: Chasing the goal of objectivity, easily measurable datapoints like number of publications and number of citations are used for quantifying impact of a researcher. This incentivizes researching/publishing low hanging fruit, because actually working on deep or unusual approaches means sinking more time into the endevour while risking less or no publishable results. For people trying to earn a living in academic institutions this would be stupid.

I can confirm the GP matches my experience in academia (PhD, published a paper based on my dissertation, left academia shortly after).

There is immense pressure for early career researchers to work on low-hanging fruit that will give easy guaranteed publications: make a minor change to previous work and write a paper about it; write a paper about what other people wrote papers about (either a review or a meta-analysis); etc. etc. This is how you rack up publications for your tenure review. It's also how you rack up publications to get funding.

Once you have tenure you have a bit more freedom, but you still need to worry about funding (generally). And by that time you've been in the habit of grabbing the lowest-hanging fruit for 1-1.5 decades, assuming you were ~well trained~ in graduate school. After so long reinforcing that habit it becomes hard and scary to build a ladder and go after the better, higher fruit.

I suggest the author cite the following works which I believe are related to this topic:

list of own publications