Stanford and Harvard just had incidents where their own top researchers got caught doing academic dishonesty of the highest order. The ivy leagues are not doing citation cartels particularly less than tier two or tier three schools.
Comparing the recent news from Harvard to the long-running scandal at Stanford doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
They had two (or a small number of) high-profile incidents. There have been thousands and thousands of researchers at those Universities during the tenure of those specific researchers. I'm open to an argument that these behaviors are more widespread than the 1/10,000 that these numbers would suggest. But even if it's 10x or 100x worse, that's still around 1%. Not "pervasive."
It's the other way around - this behaviour is so normalized and so common, that it's outright not reported on because it's such a part of daily academic work.
You have evidence for small rates of fraud, but you have feelings that suggest the numbers are enormous? And nobody reports on outright fraud? This is not my experience, and certainly not even remotely scientific.