No hard rule, no crisis.
Maybe we can go back to very opinionated “true” academia,
where there are institutional gatekeepers,
but they mostly get it right on who to award (and not),
vs the current game of
“whoever plays ball with funding sources the best = the best academic”,
which is obviously bullshit.
You'll still need to convince the purseholders to pay you, and they'll want some objective metric to measure your output, and whatever metric they pick will be gamed.
The point of my comment was,
in much earlier institutions of knowledge and excellence,
the only transparent metric was whether or not they approved you.
That ossifies intellectual monocultures, though. (Or, heaven forbid, if someone has a financial conflict of interest in the private sphere...)
The current solution doesn’t resist capture by capital either,
and indeed we’re already left with all of the things claimed - the worst of both worlds, really.