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.
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.