I don't understand the logic here. I've been told many times that the academic's dream is to find a field where he's the only active researcher. Fewer active researchers means fewer PhD positions, sure, but it also means more prominence for those who remain, less effort involved in finding publishable results, etc.
My go-to example of offensively low-hanging fruit is De Morgan's law(s), which I still can't believe were named after a person. They state, in plain english:
1. If it is not the case that a collection of claims are all true, then one or more of the claims is false.
2. If it is not the case that any of a collection of claims is true, then they are all false.
When you're the only active researcher in a field, you can have observations like that named after you too!
(Not in the sense of the NSA.)
I've heard that CS is better. But still has tendencies that way.
I'm glad that there's an effort to consolidate and simplify the proof, since as they say, it could end up effectively lost forever.