It’s a place where extremely skilled people work highly motivated on humanities hardest problems at scale.

CERN pushed distributed computing and storage before anyone else hat problems on that scale.

CERN pushed edge computing for massive data analysis before anyone else even generated data at that rate.

CERN is currently pushing the physical boundaries of device synchronisation ( Check „ White Rabbit“ ), same for data transmission. CERNS accelerator cooling tech paves the way for industrial super cooling, magnet coils push super conduction…

Companies are always late in the game, they come once there is money to be had: No one founded a fusion startup until we were close enough to the relevant tripple product.

Seems these are all positive things and it’s good that private donors are adding some money.

You are perfectly right, this has been similar to the "space industry" (which includes 'ballistic nukes' knowhow maintainance). The thing with a bigger collider is it seems there are, not that honnest, scientists retro-fitting models in order to reach 'appropriate for this new collider' energy ranges where 'new physics' could be found.

I misread the first bit as the hardest problem in the Humanities.

I’m not sure I have any idea what the hardest problem in the humanities is.