Relying just on h-index is bad in the first places. I habe colleagues in experimental physics who are on papers with tens of coauthors, working only on a small bit that enabled multiple experiments and have an amazing hindex. you cannot compare that to a theoretically working niche field. In the end it is about wrong incentives in science. See also this article on rising self citations [0] . Having said that h-index is a good KPI to track for myself.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00090-z

I know lots of people who are authors on papers they've never even looked at. (They implicitly agreed to be authors and know that there's some such papers, they just didn't even read the tiles)

you could get a friend/family member to do the same thing though (they cite each other thousands of times)

Yes, but the bar is higher. No safe is impenetrable, or alarm system foolproof, but they do make undesirable actions more difficult.

Or if you got good charisma you can do it with most others.

Citation rings are a major issue, particularly in AI conferences.

Just out of curiosity, do AI practitioners utilize AI to optimize citations? If so, I'd expect papers detailing how to go about it to get massive citations. The appropriate venue might be the Journal of Data Science, Informetrics, and Citation Studies [0], and I didn't see any such articles there yet.

[0] https://jcitation.org/index.php/jdscics

But also particularly in a lot of fields.

One problem in niche areas is that sometimes there are only so many people working on a particular problem and only so many different papers/authors to cite.

I'm not talking about niche areas. I'm talking about genuine illicit citation rings.