What most people fail to realize is that fundamentally, most principle investigators, the people who actually run the research world, are primarily fundraisers. Their day-to-day job is a mix of grant and proposal writing, relationship building/organizational meetings, and checking in on their postdocs, candidates, and lab techs.
Your main goal, as a PI, is to keep your lab running, and thus research flowing, by any means possible. For some PIs, this means milking every drop of available talent and time out of your doctoral candidates, and is the most common cause of the horror stories you hear about people leaving academia. On the other end of the extreme, they can embed themselves so deeply in fundraising with private or public capital that their lab staff don't see them for more than 15-30 minutes a week, because they are essentially living their lives hopping from sales meeting to sales meeting.
This wouldn't be a problem if the job of the PI was explicitly meant to be that of a salesman, but the actual role of a PI is to define the research being done. They draft the hypotheses, the expected impact, etc, because that is their intended role, but in reality these will always be constructed in a way that makes it easier for the PI to solicit funding.
It's impossible for the attention economy to not play into the research funding loop then, because every set of eyeballs is another potential revenue source for future research, or a tool to justify growing the footprint of your lab. I wouldn't go so far as to call the superstructure corrupting of science though, not in those words. I'd say it forces science to be mission focused, where the mission is a subtle negotiation between the people funding the research and the people performing it, and often times the person with the capital lands much closer to their ideal.
Just speaking from personal experience, what you describe gets murky really fast in a couple of ways.
The model you're describing implicitly is this idealistic "executive-mentor" model of the PI, who has the ideas and the postdocs or doctoral students are just implementing it. Basically scientist wants to produce, so needs help and outsources the work to others.
In my experience, though, this is not at all what happens many times. Ideas come from those doctoral students or postdocs or whowever, the PI takes them, and then they get credit for those ideas. I've seen PIs who really don't fundamentally understand the research areas, who kind of are just "black holes" for credit of the ideas and work of others around them, and then because they're more senior, they end up getting the credit. Sometimes this process seems intentional, in that the PI cultivates a false impression of what's going on, and sometimes it just happens because of the nature of the attention economy.
So although the "executive-mentor" model is a good one, what's closer to reality in many cases (although not all) is more of a "public liason-mascot" system, or some kind of hybrid.
Because of this mismatch between reality and the assumed schema, the attention economy then incentivizes abuse and corruption.
This isn't even getting into issues about how chasing grants as a fundamental scientific endeavor distorts what is researched. Even if you have a pure leader-mentor PI who is just trying to get their own independent ideas researched with funding, you then have to ask "what is rewarded? Is it what's good rigorous science, or what is popular?"
The problem I think is that what garners attention is not what is rigorous or innovative. Sometimes those things overlap, and maybe they're correlated, but they're not the same.
Maybe this isn't unique to science, but it doesn't make it ok, and it seems like changing it to prevent these problems is necessary.
Your main goal, as a PI, is to keep your lab running, and thus research flowing, by any means possible. For some PIs, this means milking every drop of available talent and time out of your doctoral candidates, and is the most common cause of the horror stories you hear about people leaving academia. On the other end of the extreme, they can embed themselves so deeply in fundraising with private or public capital that their lab staff don't see them for more than 15-30 minutes a week, because they are essentially living their lives hopping from sales meeting to sales meeting.
This wouldn't be a problem if the job of the PI was explicitly meant to be that of a salesman, but the actual role of a PI is to define the research being done. They draft the hypotheses, the expected impact, etc, because that is their intended role, but in reality these will always be constructed in a way that makes it easier for the PI to solicit funding.
It's impossible for the attention economy to not play into the research funding loop then, because every set of eyeballs is another potential revenue source for future research, or a tool to justify growing the footprint of your lab. I wouldn't go so far as to call the superstructure corrupting of science though, not in those words. I'd say it forces science to be mission focused, where the mission is a subtle negotiation between the people funding the research and the people performing it, and often times the person with the capital lands much closer to their ideal.