I have been in both academia and industry for years, and I don't think the model you describe is true anymore. It was definitely true 10 years ago, but the situation has flipped. Now, I see really ambitious and impactful research coming out of industry labs. Academia is often lagging behind the state of the art because they lack the resources (data, compute, and skills) to compete.

Academia is also incentivized such that everyone works on the same popular topics to secure grants and citations. This is currently LLMs, where academia needs to compete with multi-billion corporations on a technology that is notoriously expensive. In effect, many researchers work on topics that are pretty non-consequential from the get go (such as N+1th evaluation dataset), but it's the only way for them to stay relevant.