If you are searching for references with plausible sounding titles then you are doing that because you don't want to have to actually read those references. After all if you read them and discover that one or more don't support your contention (or even worse, refutes it) then you would feel worse about what you are doing. So I suspect there would be a tendency to completely ignore such references and never consider if they actually exist.

LLMs should be awesome at finding plausible sounding titles. The crappy researcher just has to remember to check for existence. Perhaps there is a business model here, bogus references as a service, where this check is done automatically.