I don't think you are overstating or misstating the problem. The economic incentives do prevent certain kinds of long term research programs, but they only slow down other kinds. What grants demand is that research publish often. So researchers have to plan ahead and mostly only pursue avenues that can lead to publication with a year or so of work.
If they can break down a big research goal into small yearly chunks, some of which can happen in parallel even, that big goal will eventually be reached. Of course, what slows down things is that a lot of effort have to be repeated per paper. Part of it is new grad students that have to learn everything from scratch, part of it is just the writing down of the paper and going through the review process, etc.
But if the research program can't be broken down, then its some prof working on it on the side while they scramble to publish enough to keep their job/funding. Usually, they don't make much progress and for all intents and purposes the research goal has been prevented by the system's incentive structure.
You get a bit of a grace period when starting grad school, and shorter ones when starting a postdoc or a faculty position, but the ability to stumble around a problem and explore it from multiple angles has become an incredible luxury.