Science, Show Business and Hollywood
If you go back in time to 19th and then early 20th century, the science was made by very few people. Normally they had funds for their work (e.g., from a benevolent monarch ) and the money was never an issue. Neither was it a problem to have your work made visible. Many of them preferred not to publish, or published in obscure journals. Thus, the groundbreaking work of J.W.Gibbs was published in an obscure scientific journal, which did not prevent him from becoming the seminal scientist in the field of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I do not remember how exactly he, an American, which was not the place to make science at the time, became known; I vaguely recall, Maxwell was involved.
The other little piece of information is: very few people enjoy and are capable of making 'true science' . There are many adjacent fields the require more people of less esoteric skills, such as the technology, business, education etc.
Fast forward to modern times and we are in a completely different world. We have so many people around the scientific fields, claiming to do science, or at least doing it as a part of what they are supposed to do, as university professors etc. The new challenges are: to be noticed, to be funded, etc.
Therefore the motto is: become visible, make yourself known, self-promote etc.
These problems have existed in show business already for a long time, and scientist are happy to learn from Hollywood.
As we know, creating a good plot, a good story for a movie is difficult. We are out of good stories, everything has been done already. Therefore, we have re-runs: the movie that has been done before is re-made with new actors. I have seen some analogies in science what an old study of 1950 is repeated again, with, or without proper credits.
As we have heard, there are more movies made in India than in the United States. As nobody is watching movies made in India outside the home country, one perhaps can do a Hollywood version of an Indian movie, with or without proper credit--- nobody will notice! Similarly, as American scientists get out of new ideas, they are happy to borrow some from obscure Russian papers of 1950s, and nobody will notice.