Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay !
Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering !
Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.
We are in a war, just as we were then. It's just slower and less visible. If we don't fix the energy problem, we are done for.
This is simply the market saying we don't need as many researchers in with Phd's in Universities.
There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.