One of the serious downsides of working in academia is you are basically doing the industry's work for them for less pay and they will one day turn around, pat you on the back, then sell your work for millions of dollars. It gets worse honestly the closer you are to applied fields. There, you already straddle the line between what your more "pure" (and less well paid) peers think is "science" and actually making things that will in fact make people's lives better, so you have less room to be idealistic about why you are doing what you're doing, that is, whether it is for "moving the needle" or "adding to the corpus of humanity's knowledge" or whether you really are just doing someone else's work for them they aren't willing to fund given the risks. And given that the latter is basically closer to what you're doing and your closer to the place where you'll see your work enable someone else's riches, it's hard not to want to jump ship and just become one of those people on the other side but make money hands over fist.
It's an upsetting situation honestly.