James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments? Wha…
And how much time Maxwell or Einstein spent on their research and how much time on chasing grants and tenure positions? Were they required to publish X papers a year, target assigned by some university manager? Were they forced to amuse and be nice for their students, so they will look good on yearly teacher's assessment?
I think we lack a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach here. Just create a way to fund lots of individual researchers and teams with small grants to study whatever they find interesting, with no crazy deadlines, credential requirements, publish-or-perish demands, administrative overhead, etc. It doesn't matter if 999/1000 just produce garbage, if the one remaining hits something big. I suspect modern science is like a gold rush, with lots of people flocking around a few fad areas, and o lot of the search space uninhabited, because if you stray out of the fad-topics, you get no advisor, no funding, no lab, nothing.