Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
But I guess this is what decades of capitalistic thinking does to people
You can safely ignore everybody, as long as you do it with your own money; or when you achieve the status of holy cow. Big mistake otherwise.
I'd even go so far as to say today this is a sign of a strong academic department, one that is comfortable with its faculty sometimes having periods of time where they are going against trend. Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less common.
The vast majority of academic scientists don't have access to particle accelerators, can't send probes into space, and so on. Regardless of who you are, there are always going to be experiments that are inaccessible to you.
And in biology (which is the context of the original post) you often need uninterrupted time, as you can't pause a live experiment if you get busy in your day job, no matter if it's bacteria or mice.
If we don't consider funding, we're effectively saying that science should be the domain of independently rich aristocrats living off of inherited wealth, as it often was a few centuries ago.
Given the existing model has brought us to a point where there are several fields in which almost no published studies can be successfully replicated, at this point I'm not even sure that it would be a bad development to go back to having the likes of Gauss and Leibniz running the show. Dependency on external funding and the pressure of publish-or-perish seems incredibly destructive to meaningful scientific progress.
Academics are responsible for sorting out academic funding and likely always will be, pretending the 2 are separate creates problems such as is seen in biology (and yes, other sciences to an extent) where big funding from the private sector is forcing open publically funded research for the greater good toward lining the pockets of nouveau-industrialists.