While I agree in the abstract, the problem is that when you're well-established, in most areas, your research basically amounts to supervising PhD students and postdocs who are not well-established. And they're struggling to meet the requirements to finish their thesis, get a permanent position, etc. So if you encourage them to do slow science and publish less, there's a high risk that you're basically letting them down. Plus, to do research you're probably using some grant funding and guess what the funding agency expects...

Thus, most people never get to a point in their career where they can safely say "let's ignore incentives and just pursue this project slowly and carefully". There might be some exceptions. Probably in math, where research is often individual. And maybe in other areas if you can have a smallish side project with other professors that doesn't require much specific funding, or if you have a student who is finishing and has already secured a position in industry so their stakes aren't high. I've been in those situations sometimes, but it's the exception rather than the rule. The truth is that even senior professors seldom have the luxury of not being heavily pressured by incentives.

At the same time, knowing someone who committed academic fraud during his PhD and was caught, I can say two things:

A lot of people do it when they simply don't need to. They're not trying to "survive in academia". They're trying to get to the top. The person in question was smart, bright, and did good research (at least excluding the stuff he made up). He could have gotten an academic position without committing fraud. And he could have had a great industry job without it too.

No matter - he simply switched to another top tier university, got his PhD, and is now running a startup. Which comes to the second point: The repercussions are minor even when you do get caught.

As an example, let's take soccer: All players will tackle if they think they can get away with it. Even Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe do it. Those who are caught receive a red card and are sent off the field. Do red cards stop tackles? No. Players just try hard not to get caught.

I understand this is a cheeky section heading and the author is not really making this point, but this may be one of the dumbest popular phrases out there. You're effectively saying "Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person." "The game," of course, is made up of players and if no one played that way there would be no game.