A more accurate title might have been "before NSF."

The practical effect of the shift from patronage to grants is a transition from multipolar to unipolar science. Any one rich patron may or may not have an instinct for what research deserves support, but their collective judgment should be a fairly wise crowd. Few rich people were born yesterday.

In a grant-funded ecosystem, even multiple funding institutions which are branches of multiple governments tend to merge into one big meta-institution, with one big opinion. This is how we get intellectual monocultures across many fields, especially fields without practical feedback from a commercial application. One big opinion is hard to change. Unfortunately, science is kind of about changing our minds...