It's the difference between giving a "brute force" computer proof like the four color theorem than try and come up with new theory where it's just a result from it.
Most folks I know are desperate to do actual science, experimental or theoretical. Instead, they optimizing some procedure/protocol.
if someone wants to do science, there is no one stopping them from doing science.
if someone comes to someone with their hands out, then theres going to be strings attached.
The copyright laws for scientific articles are. I just link to Aaron Swartz' Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...
However, in practice that isn't an issue:
1) At least in this domain, all publications are de facto open access, as in, if you just google the name of a paper in a random citation in 99% cases you will get a non-paywalled full text version - if not from the actual place of publication, then on arxiv, author's home page, etc. It's not totally appropriate as there could be differences, but it's definitely enough to say "there is no one stopping them from doing science".
2) If you do actually need access to the university library databases for paywalled articles, then just go to the library. If you want to do science, there are options. Most people simply have or get some kind of university/college affiliation. If you don't, in many places you can still use the university library to access the data without the paywalls. If not, then you often can (depending on your country) "join" university to audit a single course, which would get you that affiliation and access to their infrastructure. I'm getting to more and more obscure scenarios, but even then there are options - the publications are accessible (though at some times not conveniently enough) and that is not a serious obstacle to doing science; it's still far less effort than actually reading and understanding these papers.
3) If you do need something that's really not available to you, just email the author. As a rule, people write articles because they want people to read them, use them and cite them. My advisor has a bunch of papers that he received that way in pre-internet time when that involved expensive mailing over the ocean. The only realistic case where an author wouldn't send a preprint version to you is because you're either rude or haven't taken the five seconds to click on the link in their homepage to get that paper.
The fundamental problem is that funding is given to those who promise the best outcome ("device that can recognize cancer") rather than the truth ("Where is the data located in an HBM").
Now, engineering work isn't bad, but today's university still has relics from a previous generation, like research papers. Hence, we're left with a bunch of research papers with little scientific content. The only fix I can think of is to offer useful alternatives to the PhD and prefer or mandate other markers of achievement like patents instead of research papers.