And yet... if survival isn't part of success, how meaningful is it?

It can be a bigger picture survival: successfully fighting Nazi Germany still got a lot of key people on successful missions killed.

But if you freely redefine "success" to be independent of the most basic parameters of longevity and ability, is it even meaningful? Without money, most ventures immediately fail. With more money, they have more options to react.

We may not like it, but money is a very handy, correlated metric with most useful definitions of "success".