What do you mean by 'anymore'. Was there some golden age of bygone glory?
As proof of this most of the open question in fundamental physics are the same ones that were open at the time of Einstein's death.
Compare also how even second rate people could do first rate work in the last fifteen years by applying deep learning to new domains.
You mention that war has a certain tendency to cut through bullshit. Ideally, market competition also does some of that. See https://gwern.net/backstop for a more general exploration:
> I suggest interpreting phenomenon as multi-level nested optimization paradigm: many systems can be usefully described as having two (or more) levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming group selection perspective.
You either play the game and survive - often at the cost of your integrity. Or you walk. I walked. No regrets.
Lots of new science to uncover, a lot of which would be basic 100-200 level college courses these days. lotta new things to pioneer. my grandpa did a lot of work with plastics, for example, that are now pretty basic; new stuff then, but now no one thinks about their 0.9 cent plastic lid on their coffee.
lots of mobility but the world wasn't hyper connected, so you could do a trip to somewhere more obscure like Indonesia or Zimbabwe and do research. Now you can just email them the questionnaire.
Years of high schools pushing college now means there are legions of grads, plenty of whom will chase academia. smaller world + growing demand = ruthless academic posturing.
Then (late 1800s?) it changed to a profession, and the focus became extracting funding from ignorant patrons.
