Although I have no doubt that, like every other field, academia is filled with politics; and publishing process probably helps enforce such politics.

However, I would argue that modern academic publishing is absolutely necessary to produce “useful” science. In order for people to build upon others’ result, they will need strong guarantee of correctness; and top conferences saves researcher a lot of time to find impactful new research, especially new ideas.

That being said, I am absolutely not suggesting the publishing system is not without uts problem, but I am kind of agreeing with LeCun here, publishing is a important part of the process, and it is will probably last longer than tesla or elon.