Almost every single of the tens of thousand papers by the hundreds of tenured academics in the field of protein folding are made obsolete by 10 google engineers.

This is what it's like when someone really moves the needle. And academic science cannot get it's head around it.

And yet, none of these scientists will suffer any career consequences. Their irrelevant work will be healthily cited by all the other scientists who are doing and have done irrelevant work. They'll retcon a story in their lit reviews about how their irrelevant work led to this.

The career consequences are saved for those who had their eye on the real ball for the last five years, but didn't get there first. For them, the comfortably irrelevant will have the gall to ask in accusatory tones: "What have you been doing these last 5 years?".