It was a crisis the moment that the Journal system was allowed to be built without any oversight from academia or the government itself.
A whole class of intelligent professionals performing a public good on public funds were tricked into doing most of the work for profitable companies who then charged these same people to read their peers’ work. They were tricked by appealing to their ego and longing for prestige.
And so now we have incessant publication/citation metrics and a tsunami of untrustworthy papers while shitty corporations rob the public funds of money that could much better spent.
Once that system was built, it was a crisis. Not just because it exists (and naturally leads to the current situation and worse). But because it was allowed to come into existence, which speaks to an intrinsic inability to self-govern on the part of the academic community.