It is true that demand for high profile publications has become source of lots of imperfections within the academic community.

If universities in their hiring and retention strategies will weigh innovativeness of work alongside journal profiles, there at least would be some attempt at balance. If academics know there are two dimensions for weighing their work, namely:

Quality of publication itself — innovativeness of the research work, which used to be extremely important many years back, but now has become almost irrelevant,

AND

Quality of journal in which the work is published;

This will do more to improve the status quo than the current system within which all that seemingly matters is the ranking of the journal. There are thousands of articles published in top journals that never really get any mention subsequently, meaning journal quality in of itself is not sufficient evidence of a high quality or impactful research endeavor.