Things like citation brokers (paid to cite papers), abuse of power, paper mills, and blackmail (pg. 10) is appalling to me. I have to question how we ended up here. Academia seems very focused on results and output, and this is used as a metric to measure a researcher's worth or value.

Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? It seems as if there is a widespread need to take shortcuts and boost your h-index. Is there a better way to determine the impact of research and to encourage researchers to not feel so pressed to output and boost their citations? Why is it like this today?

Academic mathematics, from what I've seen, seems incredibly competitive and stressful (to be fair, so does competition math from a young age), perhaps because the only career for many mathematicians (outside a topics with applications such as but not limited to number theory, probability, and combinatorics) is academia. Does this play into what this article talks about?

Easy to see how social sciences can be games. Much sadder to see Mathematics get gamed too. It provides ammo to folks looking to defund the topics.