This statement holds up pretty well if you drop the country from it. Academia follows incentive structures just like everything else.
Say you were a software engineer who was paid by how often you shipped code with a nice title but you didn't have to give people the binaries so noone ever ran them. That is, the difference between nice documentation about code that never quite existed and scruffy documentation about code that does really useful things is you get money for the first and fired for the second.
Academia isn't quite that extreme but it does have incentives pointed in that direction.
Say you were a software engineer who was paid by how often you shipped code with a nice title but you didn't have to give people the binaries so noone ever ran them. That is, the difference between nice documentation about code that never quite existed and scruffy documentation about code that does really useful things is you get money for the first and fired for the second.
Academia isn't quite that extreme but it does have incentives pointed in that direction.