The academic system is a tiered system. Publish or perish is a term that mostly applies to early to mid career researchers, who are pracitcally all employed on fixed term contracts.You don’t lose your job if you don’t publish, you just can’t get (or are less competitive for) your next job.

Tenured academics (professors/A. Prof.) are on ongoing employment by the university. Their job is never really under threat. Although if they wanted to move jobs and be successful in grants then they want a productive group (many publications) to prove they are leading cutting edge research.

Universities care directly around how much grant funding their professors can pull into the university. However, in many countries it’s difficult to remove long serving academics. It’s not uncommon for ‘retired’ proffs to die at their desk, even though they checked out decade’s ago.