Developers get rewarded for shipping something big and attention-grabbing, not for doing the boring work of securing the network. They need to make their mark so they can attract grants and keep funding flowing.

Is that supposed to describe Core? Because that clearly isn't how funding has been working the past decade. On the contrary we had many people complain that they couldn't get funding to work on a flashy soft fork, or singular big feature extension, while pushing funding for testing, infrastructure, fuzzing, hardening, build system, and p2p.