Blaming the authors for demonstrating the deep flaws in this metric is certainly wrong however. This article is almost accusing some rigorous scientists, who choose to publish often and diligently reference their prior work to encourage fact checking and peer review, as frauds.

I disagree with the assertion that bad metrics should be used if there are no alternatives. Bad metrics give wrong answers, and only the illusion of meaningful information. The most common use of bad metrics is to lie to people, and it isn't the scientists using the metrics but the organizations that employ them.