I did a PhD and about a decade in postdoc/early-career researcher posts before moving into tech. That was in Computational Mathematics, it was clear that the most successful people in the field were the ones who had found areas where they could publish "Technique X applied to field Y" type papers, so for each new X they could get 10 publications (by way of 10 different PhD students). These people generally could steer the core funding in the discipline their way.

Everyone else basically had to reformulate their research to pretend it was applicable to the government's funding subject de jure. This led to some quite large stretches in definition to achieve "<Main area of research>, and some applications in <funding stream>". This very much felt like it was sucking up to money.

I got out of the academia in the end because it felt like the more senior I got the more time I spent applying for funding and managing the spending and the less time I spent doing research/development. (Also given I was in a UK public sector institute, the pay was shit due to 40 years of below inflation pay rises crippling the institution).