I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.

But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.

A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.