> That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful.

I think it is a matter even worse than being a junk drawer. It seems to be actively opposed to practicality and regards referencing the real world with scorn. That is frankly an ancient form of stupidity that goes back a very long time, to Ancient Greece at the very least. And it continues to today: any time that something becomes practical it gets banned from philosophy and philosophers stop writing on it.