This is increasingly common across numerous fields. Certainly in academia, but also in corporate R&D, investing, venture capital, military procurement, etc.

Novel trials are big risks, are institutional (or worse, multi-institutional), and searcch spaces are large, well-picked-over, and huge gains improbabble. Though aversion to novelty is a long-standing behaviour, see "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", by Bernhard J. Stern (1937):

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

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