I think most people forget the graph-like nature of scientific research. You don't have n useful papers and m useless ones by themselves, you have an interconnection of those. There may be isolated cliques of uselessness, but there isn't a clear correlation between academia and private research.

Many ideas come from philosophy, which many find useless.

Heraclitus discovered change back in ancient Greek, I don't know where we would be in scientific research without that (deliberately ignoring the debate about the originality of what we know about Heraclitus work). I bet his contemporaries found his "research" useless.