You have several fair points. The overall direction of course gets some incentives from industry. But there are government sponsorships & private fellowship to

You have several fair points. The overall direction of course gets some incentives from industry. But there are government sponsorships & private fellowship too. ELLIS, DARPA, NSF, NIH invest several billion dollars each year to R1, CAREER, MRI, SURF programs which takes care of fledgling topics until they see more adoption. Simons Foundation e.g. similarly hosts several hundred researchers to work on CS theory. Also Google and AWS in particular have put in a lot of money on ML/RL based solutions - on reducing electricity grid loads, Alphafold protein & drug discovery, neuroscience, precision agriculture, personalized education & even interplanetary science/astronomy. You could argue these could be glamorized CSR programs. But in net effects, they are advancing our understanding in several discipline which do not directly feed their bottomlines. (Full disclosure again: I am not affiliated to any FAGMA or benefitted from any of these grants)