> the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding

This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).

At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.

At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.

Academia is a market. Your customers are reviewers and your income is citations. You have to pander to this market with everything that you got.

I agree with this sentiment*

So really the choice comes down to the problem you want to solve: if it's easier to sell to reviewers do it in academia, if it's easier to sell to customers do it in industry.

(* if not the detail - non academic impact is worth quite a lot in uk academia nowadays, and you may at times measure that through e.g. sales figures, but these in turn must ultimately be sold to reviewers)

Speaking as a former tenured professor, I can say this is no longer very accurate. What would be more accurate is that your customers are grant review panels, and your income is indirect funds on grants (at least in the US, and increasingly elsewhere).

>> academia may have worsened in the meantime

> This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.

I think it's a bit of the opposite: academia didn't get _that_ worse but entrepreneurship has gotten much much better. In reality it's probably a mix of both.

I think this depends very much on what field you're in, who your supervisor is, etc. I'm a PhD student and I haven't written a single grant application in two years so far.

Also, imo writing papers feels more like "persuasion" than "salesmanship". For one, in-depth discussion of the shortcomings or drawbacks of your approach tends to be appreciated in academia.

I think that when others are talking about the experience of being an academic, they mean that of a professor, not student. While some students do help their advisors write grants, I don't think it's the norm - I never did. But grant-writing is a major concern for professors at top-tier research universities.