Discovery science is definitely harder to fund than hypothesis science. To take geologic mapping as the example again, the economic ROI has fallen over the pas

Discovery science is definitely harder to fund than hypothesis science. To take geologic mapping as the example again, the economic ROI has fallen over the past few centuries, when there were bigger unknown areas and you were more likely to literally or figuratively strike gold with only a coarse survey. So while there's still funding for pure mapping, there's not as much as there used to be. I would argue that the scientific benefits of pure discovery are often still quite high, but it's typically easier to convince reviewers to fund a project when you can point to specific well-defined hypotheses that you'll be testing rather than just "because we don't know what's out there".