It always has been. The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947, kicking off the entire modern world of computing.

Probably. However you have to consider fields that are outside of the scope of commercial companies. Nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) is a good example. If you are referring to NPL than it is definitely true.

That's the free market at work I would guess. Zalando seems to see NLP research as a valuable asset so they pay for projects like this plus they open source it assumably because of employer branding. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Zalando Research is an internal team of researches, their work is primarily shared with the research community through publications: https://research.zalando.com/welcome/mission/publications/

In the case of Flair, research led to a reference implementation, which was then matured through internal use and open sourced to further mature it and get external feedback. While employer branding is a nice benefit, it is a positive side-effect, not the motivation in itself :)