I'd strongly encourage you to leave academia for at least 2 years, preferably a little more -- and go intern, or work at, at least 2 or 3 different companies. This will benefit your mental health, working practices, and sense of perspective.
Academia is full of superstitions and misunderstandings about 'industry', and is an ideologically closed system designed to present itself and its practices as of the highest value. Including, as mentioned here, hijacking 'industrial values' (such as utility, applicability, etc.) and presenting itself with them.
This is in part a straight deception: academics need to lie about this to governments and other funding agencies in order to get funding. And in part naivety, their sense of 'application' is so far removed from any, that they are poor judges of it.
Enabling these deceptions is, of course, that academic output does occasionally have an impact over longer time horizons. But it is more the case that something written ~30 years ago will today find some use by a small team somewhere -- which might have a lot of impact, but isnt on the scale or time lines you'd need for your research today to give you an ROI.
Indeed, as you'll see if you're in industry long enough, there is often something very suspicious and deceptive about the values of various research communities. Even when researchers are told: no one cares about this, this does not have the value you say it does, this isn't a real problem etc.-- they continue. Why? Because they aren't interested in solving problems people have, they are interested in whatever puzzles are current within their community.
If you want to solve real problems using research, it is better to go out and undertand what problems people actually have, then go back into research aiming to help them.