>It feels like the broader trend is for academics to move towards applied research, instead.

Funny enough it was the opposite in my niche, a few years ago I could not get any applied research published. The CS reviewers would write things like 'where's the novelty? there are no novel architectures here', the biology reviewers would write things like 'this is a neat tool but we have other solutions that work worse but are established', and the papers would die as preprints. Ah well, glad I'm out of that game.