Yeah, I've witnessed this myself. The amount of money that goes into materials projects with "medical imaging" or similar supposed applications is crazy. Most of these "novel" materials are created by some process the authors don't fully understand. They usually have some electrical or optical properties that are unusual, but given the range of possible materials almost anything can turn out to be unusual in some way. Anyway, you combine such materials with a few big names, and you keep the grant snowball rolling rolling rolling, and you publish in Nature XYZ on a monthly basis. Meanwhile I see professors doing good and serious fundamental work in condensed matter (and many other areas) losing their jobs.