It is. This setup makes sure that there's little to no critical thinking in academia; the reviewers will stop it ("this is not the state of the science"), the editors will stop it (by giving it to reviewers they know will say what they want them to say), the publishers will reject it if it's too controversial. If you write something that pisses on an established orthodoxy, the reviewers will tear you apart. If you write something that tries to combine two things, they'll give it to two reviewers from these different sides, and each will tear up the part of the other. So academia encourages people to run with what they usually run with, and PhD candidates and students have to kiss up to these same professors, who ill control them in just the same way. Those are fiefdoms, quite literally, and success comes through fealty to the prince(s).