While I sympathize with your sentiment - indeed much research is done that is incremental, not groundbreaking - your comment does not accurately describe academic research.
Full-time scientist positions, whether in academia or elsewhere, are competitive in the extreme. Even with tenure protections, if your hypothetical researcher does not generate impactful research, he or she could expect to be out of a job in relatively short order. In other words, just publishing a paper is not enough anymore. Scientists are constantly evaluated by their peers, not just in the form of peer review. PIs, in particular, are judged harshly by the amount and quality ("impact") of their work, and the grant money they bring in. (Fun fact: usually about half of all grants just go to the university; the PI only gets to keep, and use, a fraction of it.)
Of course nowadays most PIs do not write the papers themselves. Most of the writing falls on postdocs and graduate students. The PIs are full-time writing grant proposals to fund such work. (Of course anything else, including teaching classes or advising graduate students, goes on top of this full-time job.) As any practicing scientist can tell you, grant committees fall easily for fashion and fad, which in the scientific community are driven by citations.
The scientific process today is dominated by the grant mechanism, which is cyclic by design. A PI, when awarded a grant, funds grad students/postdocs/junior staff to produce research that is documented in the form of publications. These publications are used in turn as justification for a new grant, which will fund the next round of research. Citation-less papers are primarily useless in this regard, as the first evaluation a grant committee will make - often before even considering the scientific justification - is to examine the impact of the published work justifying it, which is usually measured algorithmically (citation number.) (Incidentally, the next step a grant committee will make is examining the reputation of the PI, which is a longer-term reflection of... citations.) It isn't hard to see why this incentivizes incremental work - groundbreaking work is risky and might not pay off; it takes time and resources, which are hard to obtain; and incremental work establishes a larger and more visible presence in the field, which is more likely to be noticed.
To put it simply, in nearly all realistic scenarios - excluding very prestigious (and rare) open-ended fellowships that ask no questions of the researcher - the reason that paper on the insulating properties of squirrel tails would exist is because a grant was awarded funding that research. In other words, because somebody gave a crap about it.