Well, that and the faux-/manufactured outrage from US Congress. Things like Coburn's waste book were designed to lampoon and degrade seemingly silly or wasteful basic-science research from just a cursory overview of the title or cherry-picked facts. That's part of a larger agenda alongside cutting basic research for cuts-sake, but it means that everyone in science is searching for a justification for even the most meager of funding. Human biomedical health is a good target—if you can come up with any plausible link, your odds of funding are better (maybe)—and I suppose robots aren't a bad one either.

The NSF has a list of responses to various such things: <https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/wastebooks>

You didn't define "we", so from my POV it's therefore wrong. If I set "we" to "the world" than your statement doesn't apply. Same when I set it to "the western world" or even just to tiny "Germany" --- because it's country I know best.

"We" have Helmholtz, Fraunhofer, Leibniz, Max-Planck. They all do long-term institutionalized research. Sometimes on their own, sometimes for industry. They employ 45000, 22000, 24000 or 32000 people respectively, a good chunk of them researchers.

But if I make the "we" wider, then I see a whole lot of scientific "academies", most of them having several members in turn. See https://allea.org/members/

I can't judge if "most research now is product centric" is correct or not. But I guess that research ending in a concrete product you can buy boosts the publicity of the research manifold.

If e.g. Fraunhofer optimizes wind rotors for turbines ... who will know it? But if they create the MP3 compression ... then it's much wider known. But already the airbag or white LEDs? Both are inventions of Fraunhofer, too. Used world-wide. And yet few know them to be coming out of a public funded research agency.

If I extrapolate this assumption of mine then I guess that inventions by other research institutions like Batelle or Smithsonian aren't equally well-known. If they aren't concrete products. If my guess is valid is on your judgement.

These labs had one thing in common: they were funded by monopolies. Xerox with copy machines, Bell with the telephone, General Electric is also known for its monopolistic practices.

And you probably heard about these little things called LLMs, that's Google research, yup, another quasi-monopoly. And it wasn't product centric, in fact, Google turned out to be pretty bad at making a product out of their research, that's how OpenAI took over.

Monopolies are bad for consumers, but there is also some good. Because they make tons of money and don't have to worry about competitors, they can invest a lot into fundamental research with a long term perspective. A competitive industry rewards shorter term strategy, because companies can't afford to wait 20 years for the next big thing if their competitor takes over after 2 years with the next small thing.