[jltsiren]

> At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too.

Grants like that are rare, because there is very little industry funding for basic research. Private funding usually comes from various trusts and foundations that operate in similar ways to government funding agencies.

> I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most.

Alexander the Great didn't win battles on his own. He needed a lot of soldiers for that. Similarly, scientific breakthroughs are meaningless on their own. You need a massive amount of grunt work by ordinary researchers to connect them to the real world and make them useful.