@neuralreckoning @Samuelmoore
This is why it is absolutely essential to understand the way that #SurveillancePublishing changes the calculus of these questions.

The services Samuel is describing also include mechanisms for ensuring that prestige and other incentives survive any sort of formal efforts to decouple metrics/evaluation/etc. from eg. citation counts. That takes a few forms, including building paper recommendation/'discovery' systems that will systematically favor flagship/higher APC journals, as well as selling surveillance-backed researcher/research evaluation products like SciVal to both researchers and granting agencies alike. The example of South Korea is extremely telling in this regard: https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#one-more-turn-of-the-screw-the-ability-of-the-former-publishers

The shift from subscriptions to APCs seems subtle, but changes nearly all of the strategic calculations from the prior era. Prestige is operationalized in entirely different ways, as is profit: as Samuel says, we focus a bit too much on the high end of APCs, when the lower end are just as pernicious - reading between the lines of investor calls, and other patterns, a clear business model of generating a smoother prestige gradient to generate maximal price discrimination for work at any 'prestige level,' where the higher volume 'lower tier' journals are an integral part of that model ( https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#information-capitalism-in-its-terrifying-splendor-here-too-pits ).

So even funders explicitly not relying on traditional prestige metrics wouldn't be enough (to the degree that's even possible, you can't exactly tell people they aren't allowed to care about Nature papers against a strong acculturated backdrop of caring about them) - if they control the recommendation, authoring, and other systems that govern being able to find a paper, as well as selling employee ranking tools based on compliance with their system, the situation looks like much more of a need for a whole-of-infrastructure approach rather than treating publication or even prestige in isolation.

Which is yet another time I find myself doing my steve ballmer chant - "it's the infrastructure, the infrastructure, the infrastructure, the infrastructure"