Never worked in academia, but in industry null results are really valuable: “we tried that, it didn’t work, don’t waste your time”. Sometimes very intuitive things just don’t work. Sometimes people are less inclined to share those things more publicly.

In a perfect world, there’s still a forcing function to get researchers to publish null results. Maybe the head of a department publishes the research they tried but didn’t work out. I wonder how much money has been lost on repeatedly trying the same approaches that don’t work.