It's been broken forever, in basically the same way it is now...

the quantity of such papers are seen as the main guarantor of being hired as a faculty, making tenure, and getting research grants.

No, these are recent developments (though the stuff from your first post may be old). For the first 300 years, scientists were amateurs without grants and no one cared about quantity. For evidence of recent changes, look at the age of NIH PIs