Grant review sessions most definitely have some amount of cronyism, and that famous luminary in a field will almost certainly get funding even if their grant application is worse than that of somebody with fewer citations or younger and with less of a track record. But there's awareness of it at least. And you'll find scientists on Twitter being very open about it, whereas before you'd mostly only find it at the pub during conferences.

There's a great passage from ET Jaynes that I'm having difficulty finding right now. He was a physicist from the 1940s on, and as a young graduate student he talks about how he had to be very careful about what he studied, because if it had the potential to contradict one of the big names of the field, then it could tank his entire career before getting started. If he hadn't "played ball" early on, we'd never have gotten his later Bayesianism.

Science is always a human process, there will be politics to some degree. Politics can only be minimized, not eliminated completely.