When you get a certain level of academic inertia (tons of postdocs under you etc), you get author credit even when you don't actively participate in the research or writing itself. What's more interesting is how many first author papers are published per year, per author. First author is typically reserved for someone who did a significant amount of the work on the paper.

Here's a quick guide: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562

Basically its mostly people in powerful positions that use their power to convert minor contributions to paper credit.

There's a list of self reported reasons how they achieve this seemingly high productivity, and the most honest bit is probably:

* mentorship of very many young researchers

* leadership of a research team, or even of many teams

* extensive collaboration

* working on multiple research areas or in core services

* availability of suitable extensive resources and data

* culmination of a large project

with the latter points giving more transient productivity.