So in one place of the world professors and higher ranking academics are taking credit for the work of those working under them, in another place academics are giving credit to children who did not even contribute, and in certain disciplines (physics for instance, afaik) it is commonplace to just name everyone working in same the place as you as co-authors, whether they contributed to that specific paper or not.

Let's not forget about ludicrous amounts of bullshit-papers being produced to inflate paper counts and citations.

Whoever thinks paper counts and authorship are good metrics for anything at this point? In fact I believe they are more likely to mislead than be useful.