The bigger problem is structural. Academic research is mostly done by early-career researchers in short-term positions. When you are a PhD student or a postdoc

The bigger problem is structural. Academic research is mostly done by early-career researchers in short-term positions. When you are a PhD student or a postdoc with only a few years to do research, you don't have the time for long-term projects. And because your career prospects are determined by your success in your current position, you have to manage the risks by working on multiple projects. By the time they graduate, the average successful PhD will then have several publishable results where they were the primary contributor. There are very few positions for mid-career individual contributors in the academia. After ~10 years, you are expected to take a leadership position. Instead of doing research yourself, you are now expected to convince your peers that your ideas are worth funding and that they should collaborate with you. If you get the funding, you will hire people to do your research. Your job is then guiding them through the early career. You can start thinking about ambitious long-term projects, but in order to make them viable, you have to break them down into smaller publishable subprojects suitable for your students.