If rigorous thought significantly reduces publication rate, we should find that the rigor of a field or a person correlates inversely with words per person-year. Establishing that fact alone, combined with the emphasis on publication in academics, would lead us to expect that any approach that allowed one to fake or dispense with intellectual rigor in a field would rapidly take over that field.

This is an excellent observation and model-fragment. There are many other things going on which also influence WPY, messing up any naive strategy for assessing things this way, but this is clearly a thing that happens. Well spotted!