In my experiences with American math, CS, and eng researchers, this is the trend for everybody because the researchers want to bump their numbers up, it's how they can get school positions, they need grants, it increases employability, etc.

Once any metric is used to measure success it immediately becomes useless. Or something like that

So true, I've always said for the longest time here that stuff like average life span and malnutrition rates are dumb metrics to measure a population's healthiness