Pretty much all tenured researchers are beyond the publish or perish stage, and I’d conjecture they also publish most of the highly cited works, since writing good papers helped them get tenured. There’s millions of such people worldwide.

Assuming there’s some “incentives and imposed constraints” anywhere uniform to academics that you’re magically free from that lets you turn low cited papers into gems at a higher rate than all of academia combined is the most self delusional, simplistic, aggrandizing belief I’ve heard in a long time.