uh... maybe in your field. personally i've never seen good physics on Vixra or good biology anywhere except in biorxiv or journals.
And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.
Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.
if you think CRISPR or P1 transduction were discovered outside academia, you are wrong. and this isn't even discussing stuff with no immediate clinical applications that is nonetheless important (jumbo phages, asgard archaea are hot rn)