R&D labs are mostly motivated by these non-extrinsic incentives too as far as I can tell. If a stable financial life is harder to achieve now than it was in the golden age of R&D labs, maybe we are scrambling too much to pursue intrinsic things. That's probably my bias though.

Another view: the hard problems, absent AI, were so hard R&D couldn't reliably spinoff extrinsic things so we stopped building R&D labs.

This is sort of consistent with one of Theil's theories for why we are stagnating.