>These bad actors should be subject to a three strikes rule: the steady corrosion of knowledge is not an accident by these individuals.

These people are working in labs funded by Exxon or Meta or Pfizer or whoever and they know what results will make continued funding worthwhile in the eyes of their donors. If the lab doesn't produce the donor will fund another one that will.

No, not really. I've read lots of research papers from commercial firms and academic labs. Bad citations are something I only ever saw in academic papers.

I think that's because a lot of bad citations come from reviewer demands to add more of them during the journal publishing process, so they're not critical to the argument and end up being low effort citations that get copy/pasted between papers. Or someone is just spamming citations to make a weak claim look strong. And all this happens because academic uses citations as a kind of currency (it's a planned non-market economy, so they have to allocate funds using proxy signals).

Commercial labs are less likely to care about the journal process to begin with, and are much less likely to publish weak claims because publishing is just a recruiting tool, not the actual end goal of the R&D department.