While working on my PhD, there was one guy in the field that would publish new, better results to Springer every time someone improved upon benchmarks. No code, no data, no conference publications, paywall restricted, unverifiable, always the best.

I am almost certain he was "hallucinating" the results. This was in the 2010s

There are well known issues in academic publishing, though I imagine it has become much noisier like open source