This seems like the obvious result of many of the unhealthy forces against science today: replacing professorship with part-timers, rewarding publishing quantity over quality, pressure to promise a quick monetizable result over in-depth basic research.
I don't buy the "low-handing fruit" argument. I think it vastly overstates the fraction of scientific knowledge that we possess. Contemporary scientific research is in a state of crisis: unhealthy and dysfunctional. Until we pay the most talented researchers to spend decades on in-depth study instead of spending pennies on segmented, p-hacked, post-hoc conclusion garbage papers, major discoveries will continue to disappear.
I don't buy the "low-handing fruit" argument. I think it vastly overstates the fraction of scientific knowledge that we possess. Contemporary scientific research is in a state of crisis: unhealthy and dysfunctional. Until we pay the most talented researchers to spend decades on in-depth study instead of spending pennies on segmented, p-hacked, post-hoc conclusion garbage papers, major discoveries will continue to disappear.