I am not sure I get your point here. First, boston dynamics is not only for military technology, sure its initial and I think a lot of current funding comes from defense stuff but so did the Internet and early web technology's funding. So if we ignore that spin, the narrative is that online kids game is being valued more than advances in robotics. Now that does not sound positive in many ways.
Ask any IT pro if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: yes! Do you own any Boston Dynamics products? No.
Ask a normal person if they've heard of Boston Dynamics: no.
Ask a normal person if they've heard of Roblox: yes! Do you own any Roblox products? Yes! My kids love it!
You can't take some highfalutin notion of 'potential progress in engineering' and directly translate it to market value. Market value comes from performance in the market.
Is it though? Do you have a source for that? Now I understand its hard to actually calculate how much funding is going to which field, after all Robotics is an interdisciplinary field if there ever was one. Last year the AI budget in US was around 1Billion and another half billion or so for quantum computing. Those numbers are so small its astounding considering a kids game is valued at 29.5 billion american dollars.
edit: Source for numbers
https://syncedreview.com/2020/08/22/trump-slashes-research-f...
And my point with choosing a THAT narrative was to put the headline into a positive light: More money towards kids games than military tech! Hooray!
Apart from that, there's of course a very logical argument too. Which is that a digital economy like Roblox is a novelty. That means it's difficult to evaluate and often it's evaluated by its potential.
The economics for robots on the other hand are drastically different. They'll have to be researched, developed, built, and maintained. Whereas for any software: You write it once and copy it for "free" to as many customers as you want.
Anyways, anyone is free to pick and chose their narrative according to their liking.