Unfortunately, EU research money nowadays is free money for private companies. How this works: a 3-year research project with a consortium of academia+industry

Unfortunately, EU research money nowadays is free money for private companies. How this works: a 3-year research project with a consortium of academia+industry of 2-3 universities (1M/each) and 4-5 private companies(50k-200k). With this money, universities do fund PhD students but with a stipend/salary of an average software engineer. In contrast, the "industry partners" do the bare minimum work a couple of days before the quarterly review. And they use 20% of that money to sub-contract their work packages to freelancers (who, btw are paid better than the PhD students) and the other 80% to cover normal OpEx. And you know... the "work packages" can be something like 5K-10K for a bootstrap/hugo website. Edit: yes, I over-simplify things a lot but that's the general modus operandi.