> why science in particular?
Because we can't usually measure our goals directly. We want outcomes like relativity and the two-slit experiment. Those results take a lot of time to uncover and have a meaningful chance of failure. If you look at an early-career scientist who hasn't produced (m)any papers, chances are they're fully qualified _and_ doing all the right things with respect to our society-level goals. However, that's hard to distinguish from outright fraud and freeloading from the outside, so we've imposed a crappy proxy measure, used for career advancement.
That's different from many jobs, where it's easy to measure incremental progress and where the results are more certain. You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.
> no decade long ongoing crisis of corporations lying about their products
Really? Flame retardants in our "food-grade" spatulas, lead leaching out from ceramic bowls into your soup and cereal, products "sold" as physical devices with a backdoor to start requiring a subscription years later, the pattern of building a brand on quality and then gutting the bill of materials to ramp up profits while deceiving customers into thinking it's the same thing, WalMart explicitly requiring manufacturers to not have any change in product numbers for the sub-par products sold there, .... Fraud is rampant, enough so that for most products I find it quite hard to actually make a sound purchasing decision, and those corporations seem to be wildly profitable.
> individuals get punished
That's true to an extent, but how many doc jockeys exist in some unimportant department in FAANG? You can have a very comfortable career skating by on minimal productive output when cause and effect for the business operate on sufficiently long timescales and with nonlocal, diffuse connections.