Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)
Because in a lot of hiring processes the worth of the researchers is based on this streer cred. It’s a messed up system.
Even more messed up is that journals that do try to be more open about their procedures and that don’t try to make a profit are marginalized or in some cases even not indexed. For example, eLife no longer has an impact factor calculated because it’s experimenting with a publishing model that disincentivises profit and some other undesirable things in academic publishing.