I work both in an R&D group at a company and at the university and it's like night and day. At the company, if we need something to do the job it is simply purchased. At the university I had long meetings about whether or not I was allowed to spend 8 euros of my own grant money on VAT. In the company, if a project is under budget, good news! we can spend it on something else. At the university I was told to spend money before end of year on a software development project otherwise there may be budget issues. Moreover, the university provides very little reward for success unless you have a tenure track position.

What is the reward for publishing papers, getting grants, or doing other things that provide direct benefit to the university? Well nothing except perhaps the continuation of your job. This isn't even guaranteed even if you can pay for yourself with grants. There is a case I know of recently of a researcher with a non-permanent position and plenty of ERC money who was fired. Why? The state ruled that he had been in his non-permanent position for too long and the university didn't have any deaths recently so there were no open positions for him.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, what is the entire goal of academic research? Write more papers? The enshitification of academia has been the introduction of metrics, the expansion of the administration, the archaic phd-postdoc-tenure-track pipeline which simply ignores in many cases that a project may need more than one super star, perhaps they need a good team with different skills that work together. From my understanding, Edward Lorenz did not publish a paper for more than 5 years while he worked on his atmospheric circulation problem. This led to the entire field of chaos. Can you imagine a research scientist today simply rejecting writing papers, advising phds and master students, simply because he had things he was interested in doing?

There is a constant pulling away from your curiosity towards whatever it is you think you will be evaluated on. And it is insidious. It typically doesn't come directly from your supervisor. It is simply the environment you find yourself surrounded in. Academic societies give awards and cite the number of papers an awardee has published in recent years. You think, perhaps i should publish more? Your colleague gets a grant and their contract is extended several years because they now have money to pay for themselves. So you think, i should apply for another grant. You see people organizing sessions, workshops, special issues, etc. They become "known". You think, perhaps I should organize a session or a special issue. Perhaps this is all my inability to keep myself focused on a singular task and push my projects forward. But I don't seem to be the only one with this experience. There is always another Nature/Science/whatever op-ed on the plight of the post-PhD, non-permanent scientific staff.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate my job. I love my job. I just wish I could find the singular focus that would drive me to complete more research instead of writing long essays on hacker news.