Money, as always. Instead of selling a product to willing customers at a profit, you try to sell your research ideas to funding organizations in the hopes that they will give you a grant.

Yes that makes sense, but what is then the goal of government funding in all of this? Is it just politics? Like we want to find out that Facebook corrupts our youth, so we fund research in that direction? Government seems to not care about whether the actual findings are true because both citations and peer review do not measure truth but popularity.

One could counter this by saying that truth is valued in the sense that publishing false papers costs you your reputation. However, there is a simple solution for this and that is to make your theories more intricate. If your theories are intricate, you can just say that it was all part of the scientific process and walk away without blame.