In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.
A simple way to make a step away from encouraging bibliometrics (which would be a step in the right direction) would be to list publications by date (most recent first) on authors pages rather than by citations count, or at least to let either users and/or authors choose the default sorting they want to use (when visiting a page for users, for their page by default for authors).
But Google remains focused on popularity because that is optimal for advertising, where large audiences are the only ones that matter and there is this insidious competition for top ranking (no expectation that anyone would ever want to dig deep into search results). That sort of focus is not ideal for non-commercial research, IMHO.