I think particular cultural contexts and audiences might have more to do with it than any inherent benefit to one or the other approach. What kind of production do we value? What kinds of "intermediate" production are there, where you sort of try out draft ideas? Etc.

I'm thinking of how things have changed over the past 100 years in science, for example, where it's become much more common to be prolific. One reason, imo, is that in the past you were judged (by a smaller group of peers) more by the quality of each publication: it reflected really badly if you wasted everyone's time by publishing something mediocre. Better to put in a little more effort and write fewer, better journal articles. Now, the incentives are different, and it's better to shotgun out the articles, because you're typically judged by your best articles, or even by some measure of throughput like total citation count or h-index, not by your average or worst article.